Founded 2009 by brothers Cedric and JF Maion
“Nerds with human values”
We believe in a different business approach, a modern and at the same time perhaps old-fashioned approach. An approach where quality and “doing the right thing” trump short-term profits.
What makes PhotoDeck different?
1- We work for our members, not for investors
PhotoDeck is a small, self-financed team founded in year 2009, with no external investors (nor loans to pay back).
Outside money and having a large organization can help grow more, grow faster, but the cost is high: time spent in coordinating a large team, potentially conflicting visions, more financial risk, and ultimately, loss of independence - which for us is more important than pure profit.
Some might call it “lack of ambition”. We call it “freedom to focus on the right things”.
Our independence and small size remove distractions and let us focus fully on constantly improving a great product with a personal touch. We don’t have a 24/7 chat connected to a bot or to a poorly qualified agent, but you get to talk directly to the people who have developed the software PhotoDeck is based on. That gives us flexibility and responsiveness our competitors can only dream of.
We are exposed to far less financial risk than large funded companies with short-term pressures and high running costs, or who dump prices in the name of growth and at the expense of their own sustainability. We have designed our prices to be fair while ensuring that they can provide us healthy profitability and support our long-term strategy.
2- We take pride in our own craft
and a technically superior platform
The late Steve Jobs was a controversial character, but one trait that resonates with us was his insistence that Apple computer be beautiful not only outside but under the hood too, down to the circuit boards.
We constantly look for ways to optimize it and make it more robust, regularly rewrite thousands of lines of code, and that makes PhotoDeck a more future-proof, more secure and technically better product than the alternatives.
The PhotoDeck platform and PhotoDeck websites might be the very fastest of all alternatives, and it’s no accident. We make sure the code our service is based on stays clean, compact, up-to-date, and beautiful.
We’ve been upgrading the live platform several times a month for over ten years, yet the latest service interruption on our servers took place as far back as year 2012.
3- We have principles
Our independence allows us to not compromise on our personal values.
We enjoy doing more than talking. Perhaps it’s because we’re engineers at heart. We abhor marketing bullsh*t and prefer telling things as they are. For example, you won’t hear us claim that “PhotoDeck will take your SEO to the next level” (instead, we wrote an in-depth, practical guide on SEO for photographers while making sure that our system will effectively support your own SEO efforts).
We like it when things are clear, simple and above all, fair. That’s why we don’t take commissions on our members’ sales, at the opposite of most of our competitors.
We believe that digital ethics is a thing, and a lot of it is about respecting individuals’ right to privacy. That’s why we don’t use creepy tracking technologies, unlike most commercial websites out there.
The environment and our children’s future are important to us, and our approach allows us to be proudly eco-responsible.
PhotoDeck is very human as a company. They listen a lot to clients, which fosters loyalty and makes their service an essential professional tool.Brigitte Mangione
A passionate photographer since he was 13, JF Maion launched in his spare time his own stock photography website as a pre-PhotoDeck experiment (that gathered over 6000 visitors a day on average at its culmination).
Prior to creating PhotoDeck, he spent 11 years managing projects and helping grow new businesses at the world’s leading mobile phone manufacturer, specializing in new online projects.
He speaks fluently four languages and has lived in five countries. He is based with his wife in Helsinki, Finland.
A CTO usually brings down-to-earth realism to product ideas. But Cedric, PhotoDeck’s nerd-in-residence, makes ambitious feature plans even more ambitious - before translating them into optimized software.
When he was 15, Cedric set out to write his own graphical operating system (he succeeded). As a teen, he also created a complete accounting application, still in commercial use.
Before his PhotoDeck life, his 10-year corporate career led him to design and manage multi-million dollar IT infrastructures.
Cedric lives with his wife and their daughters in Lyon, France.