Congrats to PicScout and PicApp–yeah we know they’re cool for finding great images

At b5media we’ve been testing the PicApp service for months.  We know that having great images in posts is critical, especially for our Celebrity and Entertainment blogs.  More importantly, though, is having legal images for these posts.  Getting legal images of celebs, etc at a reasonable price is a difficult undertaking.  Then there is the whole area of images that are just illustrative of a concept…  Yes, stock photography is available, but managing licenses and rights across over 300 blogs is a nightmare.

This is why PicApp was so appealing to b5media.

Their service lets us find and include images from Getty and picappCorbis in our blogs without fear of copyright or legal issues.  GigaOm has a nice piece on picapp, of course nothing said is news to us:

PicApp’s business approach could be best described as “making lemonade when life serves you lemons.” It’s parent company is Israel-based PicScout which has technology that helps image copyright owners identify the copyright infringements online.picapp Eyal Gura, CEO of PicScout told us that there are millions of photos that get taken from the sites of big photo agencies and show up on the web (replete with watermarks.) Litigation seems like a losing battle, but free ad-supported photos is worth a shot. Source: For Bloggers, Legit News Photos For Free – GigaOM

The folks at picapp have been just awesome through their beta period.  We’ve really hammered on the service and it has improved by leaps and bounds in a very short amount of time.

Etay of PicScout spoke apicappt b5media’s blognetworkcamp during SXSW giving others insight into the product and what is coming down the road.  It’s very cool…believe me.

If you’d like to spice up your blog with images, of specific people or just concepts, I really suggest trying picapp.  What do you have to lose, it’s free!