Mostphotos.com is aiming to change the online micro-stock photography market by combining two tired Web 2.0 traditions, social networking and user-submitted content. According to a company press release, Mostphotos is launching a rating system that it hopes will help viewers sort through the massive piles of dreadful images submitted to unmoderated micro-stock sites. In theory, users would vote the best images to the top, potentially making customers' lives easier by ranking images by popularity.

A quick surf around the Mostphotos website shows that the ratings system does push better images to the top.

But will it thrive? The micro-stock industry has always been the bottom of the photography market, where professionals and amateurs alike try to sell their leftovers images for prices far under normal assignment rates, sometimes for as little as a dollar per image. Old-guard professional photographers and high-price stock and assignment sites have often complained that such operations are "killing the profession." But anyone looking at sites like Mostphotos knows that generic, oversaturated images of birds and shorelines won’t be gracing the cover of National Geographic anytime soon.

Photo by Chris Tompkins 

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