First of all we would like to thank everyone, especially our contributors for supporting us in reaching this important milestone. It's not easy to start a stock agency from scratch and the road is long ahead of us, but we're going to keep working hard on bringing you a great buying and selling experience.

Last week we attended the Microstock Expo in Berlin. Having over 150 microstock agency professionals and top stock photographers attending from all over the world, the conference was a great success. Our very own Peter Hamza was one of the speakers on the Agency Workshop panel talking about business opportunities in the microstock market. If you've missed out, you'll be able to watch the videos later and join in next year!

If you don't have a PayPal account — or for some mysterious reason they don't seem to like your credit card — we have three solutions for you:

— We've added WorldPay as our primary 3rd party payment processor. They are one of the industry leaders, securely processing millions of payments every day.
— You can also pay via Moneybookers (Skrill), which is a similar service to PayPal, but it's available in a lot more countries.
— If you prefer to buy credits in bulk, you might also like our new Bank transfer option where you simply download an invoice, wire the money and when it arrives we top up your account automatically.

Buy credits now!

Looking for inspiration? Be sure to check out our brand new Photographer directory and Image categories pages!

It's been over two months since our previous blog post. There's just so much going on that we hardly ever find the time to write. I think we understand now why Twitter is so popular! ;) By the way, be sure to follow us there for regular updates.

Our image collection is shaping up nicely and we're adding thousands of great images every day despite the fact that we're allegedly quite picky. We now have over 600,000 high quality stock photos and vectors on the site by over 1200 contributors. We would like to thank all the image suppliers for their continued support. We keep saying this, but really, without them we wouldn't stand a chance against the big guys!

We've come a long way, but the road is still very long ahead of us and there are plenty of things to work on. For your convenience we have just added Facebook Connect to the site for easier signups / logins, SSL support for the entire account section and very soon we're going to add a second payment processor for those who can't or don't wish to use PayPal. More languages are coming as well, including Russian and Brazilian Portuguese!

How would _you_ improve the site? Got any great ideas? Is there something that drives you nuts? :) Let us know!

We have a tough year behind us. Launching a brand new stock photo agency from scratch is not the easiest task, especially in this market and business climate, but we're happy to say that we have a steady stream of traffic and a constantly growing, fantastic collection of files despite our tiny marketing budget. The greatest Xmas present for us this year is that we've just hit 500,000 images and there are over 1000 contributors on Stockfresh already!

In 2011 we're going to continue building a highly competitive, fresh and diverse collection of stock photos and vectors and as we're getting closer to the 1 million mark we're also going to increase our marketing budget and efforts gradually to spread the word about the site and its ideals: simplity, quality and fair trade.

The entire Stockfresh team would like to thank all of you for your continued support and wish everyone a joyous Christmas season and the very best for 2011!

Last week the leading microstock agency shocked the stock photography community with the announcement of a new royalty structure that means huge pay cuts to most of its image suppliers even though they already have the lowest royalty rates in the entire industry.

Being launched in June, Stockfresh is nowhere near the biggest agencies in terms of size and revenues, but we were among the top 5 with Stockxpert and we've always believed in doing business the right way — the way it benefits all parties involved. We truly apprieciate the hard work of our image suppliers and we are proud of our exceptionally high royalty rates.

Wherever you may decide to buy images, please always shop at agencies where image suppliers get a fair share. Ditch the ones that exploit them. After all, nobody likes when their work is undervalued, right? Most sites have their royalty rates posted so they are easy to find out. Let's spread the word and make this world a better place together! :)

In lighter news, we have some amazing new artists on board! Please check out the beautiful photos of ssuaphoto and choreograph for example, or if you have a craving for vector illustrations, we are pleased to announce that we also have a vast collection of brand new vector files including some great and stylish icon sets by Filata and dogandcat. Oh, and if you like the work of Andres Rodriguez, you'll love to hear that we're adding his entire portfolio as we speak.

Stockfresh now features nearly 300,000 stock photos and graphics from over 550 contributors and the number of artists signing up to sell their work every day is simply amazing. Actually, we better get back to importing images right now. If you need us, just drop us a line through the contact form. See you later!

Although we have a very small team, during the last few weeks we've been working round the clock to get as much content online as it's physically possible. As of today we have over 200,000 high quality stock photos, graphics and vector files available for download! With already over 300 photographers and digital artists on board - and many more to come - we're going to keep building this fantastic collection.

Please visit some of our new arrivals: We have the entire CandyboxPhoto and aremafoto portfolios online, but don't forget to check out Russian microstock superstar Pavel Losevsky's work either!

The CEPIC New Media Conference was awesome! It was great finally seeing all the photographers we've been working together for years. Kudos to Lee for putting this event together. We've started to test the waters with some advertising and there's a lot of work ahead of us. Gotta spread the word! (By the way, if you'd like to help, join our Affiliate program now!)

In other news, we're also starting to open the gates for new contributors. It is really amazing that so many of you are excited about Stockfresh and we're going to get everyone on board as soon as we can. At the moment there are over 600 pending application (worked it down from 700). Thank you very much for your patience!

Last but not least let's give a warm welcome to another top photographer, Elenaphoto a.k.a. Elena Elisseeva, who got into our top 5 by adding her entire portfolio to Stockfresh! Over and out!

The discussions at the New Media Conference will cover microstock, metadata, stock video, the use of new and social media as marketing tools and the future of the industry in general The event is organised and moderated by the esteemed microstock and UGC presenter, Lee Torrens. Sounds very exciting, so be there if you can and let's meet up!

On behalf of the entire Stockfresh team I would like to welcome everyone to our brand new website! We truly hope that you'll enjoy using our services. Feel free to look around, and if you have any questions or comments, let us know. Thanks for stopping by!

While preparing for next week's launch we received over 35,000 top quality images from microstock master Yuri Arcurs and Russia based Dmitriy Shironosov! With the addition of the complete Monkey Business Images portfolio - which is being processed right now - we will reach our launch target of 100,000 images! Can't wait to go live with the site!

We're proud to welcome Lev Dolgachov on board! With over ten thousand beautiful images he's got an offering few others in the industry have. Enjoy!