As a creative in Africa, getting awesome African photos is a pain as most image marketplaces will hardly meet your needs. It’s even more painful if you are a professional creative with a deadline to beat or an agency with a demanding client or just a business and want to do your own creative job.
The good news is that Foto.com.ng, the Spark-backed Africa’s Shutterstock has hit over 10,000 African images as it moves to help solve the problem of finding culturally, environmentally and ethnically relevant stock images this side of the world. Since it’s launch in March, Foto is reporting exploding demand for African images taken by professionals on the contient aims to have 100,000 images by end of the year.
Armed with a $70,000 seed from Spark, the 13 person team is targeting the $11B image market globally.
Speaking to TechMoran, Sola Akindolu Product Manager at Spark said, “Foto is currently doubling its efforts at all things from customer service to sales and improving on the product side.”
Akindolu added that the firm is also working on algorithims to make image discovery simple so that users find exact images fast. It’s user experience has been improved for quick discovery, easy organic search and on site search. Apart from its own images, Foto is also working with 200 photographers in Nigeria to sell their images via the site. If you don’t stay in Nigeria, relax. Foto will soon open up its platform to work with photographers from anywhere in Africa.
For just $15 you can download a small 500k image while with $45 you can get an XXL 11Mb image. Foto also has a Foto Startup plan at ₦10,000 for 25 images or a Foto Subscription plan for 5 high quality images everyday starting as low as ₦222 per image.