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In the late 90's it was obvious that the internet was going to play a significant part in the role of distribution of photography. Having used scanners for publishing, Tim wanted to get his photography digitally distributed and started supplying his work on CDRom. The press did not embrace this at first, but travel companies did. Only they still required Tim to do image searches and go to the post office to send off the selection burnt on a CD. Traveling a lot, Tim realized he was missing sales of his work by not being behind his desk, so he wanted his images downloadable from his website. He saw that the big photo agencies had immediate downloading so image buyers no longer had the time or patience to call several photographers to make selections and take days to send in them through the post. For a photographer to keep his sales he would need the same instant delivery and rights control tool offered by the photo agencies. In 2001 Tim outsourced programming to Russia to produce his first downloadable image database. To recover costs, and because it seemed a logical move, the program was designed to allow other photographers to take out accounts and use the same application and database. Tim marketed this as digitalphotosonline.com to a handful of photographers worldwide. It worked as proof of concept, but the code was not really scalable. Tim realized to do it properly it would need backing.
In 2003 Tim was approached by the Japanese printing company Koyosha Ltd. to advise on redeveloping a print workflow software package into a hosted system for photographers like his DigitalPhotosonline service and to further integrate images into the printing workflow. As a consultant project manager to Terrgrafica Inc., the San Francisco based software company producing the programs for the Japanese, Tim input features and ideas in to ActiveAssets in the hope that a spin off product would eventually take over from Digitalphotosonline for the USA and Europe. After a year it was still very much a Japanese product for their own market, so Tim left to develop a second version of his software for a shared photographer image database system for backing up, delivery and rights control. The new version launched under the name of ProMediaserve has been running since March 2005.
Tim is now using his software to relaunch his own stock images and produce a new series of Royalty Free product available for download and on CD ROM. He hopes that this could lead to shooting 100% stock sold through this website, giving him the freedom to shoot what he wants when he wants.
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