Picfair, the world’s first photographer-controlled image marketplace is at WTM London 2017 to explain how it differs to other companies in the photo-licensing arena.

The company allows anyone to upload their photos and decide how much they should sell for and matches anyone looking for a particular photo with photographers, be they amateurs or professionals.

Picfair says it is “revolutionising the image licensing industry, flipping the decades-old model that excludes emerging photographers and funnels royalties to middlemen”.

Having spent the last three years recruiting 25,000 emerging photographers from across the globe and accruing a library of five million images in the process, travel is Picfair’s strongest area.

This year Picfair added 1,000 photographers from across Africa as part of its Celebrate Africa competition hosted on behalf of Canon.

This year also saw Picfair adding Lonely Planet, Rough Guides and National Geographic as customers, with other early adopters including LuxTripper, Elle Travel, Bookmark, Mixmag, and several innovative travel companies.

Picfair’s library is powered by its recently-launched Picked algorithm, a curation system enabling it to rank images uploaded from anywhere, regardless of whether the photographer is an award-winning professional or an emerging amateur.

This means that that, when searching for a destination, the top search results are as likely to be taken by a local as they are by a pro.

Stand: TT155