Lucky Oliver, Stock Photos with Style
(6 votes, average: 4.83 out of 5)
Loading ...I recently became aware of a new stock photo resource called Lucky Oliver. I was immediately taken with the design of the site and intrigued by the carnival theme that carries through the site. The budget pricing model caught my eye too as I use lots of stock photography and don’t always want to pay $75 or more for a small web-resolution image. A dollar for a blog-sized photo… now that works for me.
I was pleased to actually find a good selection of quality images on the site. The search was fast and once you choose an image to preview, it’s easy to see any of the other images or sets associated with it. Again, the interface and layout are well thought (iStockPhoto always feels a little clunky to me) out and the flow through the site seems pretty natural. You can tell that they designed the site to let the photos be the focus.
I did run into one minor search issue. I found several images I wanted to show a client for approval and I didn’t take the time to use the “shoebox” (aka lightbox) feature on the site. I just downloaded the images to the desktop. I showed the client the photos, got approval and when I went back to the website, found that I was unable to search by the filename. I couldn’t remember exactly what searches I had done to find the images the first time so I didn’t know how to relocate them all.
I emailed the Lucky Oliver support team detailing my problem and I literally got a phone call in less than 2 minutes from sending it. It was Bryan Zmijewski, the founder and “big cheese” over at Lucky Oliver calling. He told me I could just zip up the image files I had, send them to the support team, and they would email me back the URLs to the images so I could make my purchase. Bryan explained that they’re working on getting the image IDs into the filename or into the URL in order to make the filename searchable as well. I sent my files to Jill, the “Community Impressario” and had a list of URLs back in just over an hour.
Overall, I really like the site, the selection of images was good (I would love to see more vector illustrations to choose from in the future..) and have already had a super customer service experience. I see a really bright future for Lucky Oliver. Thanks to Bryan and Jill and their team for a job well done.
Yes, LuckyOliver is a great resource and really taking on the microstock market with their stratigic and well executed website. I too have experienced great results from their customer service team. And CEO Bryan is very approachable.
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man… I was REALLY saddened to see that LuckyOliver closed up shop just last month. I guess the microstock market is just really hard to break into. Good luck to the guys there in thier next venture.