Company Info

If you can read this… you’re hired.

Formed in 1981, Masterfile has grown to be one of the largest commercial stock photo agencies in the world. We do business on every continent... except Antarctica (we’re working on that one) and have independent agents in over 30 countries.

Headquartered in Toronto, Masterfile has wholly owned offices in London, Paris, Düsseldorf and Milan. 90% of our business comes from transactions outside of the Canadian market.

In the beginning, mass distribution of printed catalogues was the primary method we used to sell images. Today of course, our website is our biggest window to the market. Not only does our site have to project and enhance the Masterfile brand, but it is the very heart of our business. Our site has to be fast and intuitive, it must be readily expandable, context sensitive and must support a robust back-end to track client activities and transactions.

The good news is, we have about a million images and more coming daily. The bad news is we have about a million images… and more coming daily.

Here is the challenge. How do you build a search engine that can intuitively dig through everything and find the right image for a client? It is an interesting problem, because the method needed can be different, even for the same client depending on the image required.

Sometimes the requirement is specific such as search for 'polar bears',

... or it could be vague like, search for 'cool' images...

what is cool and who says so?

Is a picture of a parking lot cool? Maybe.

Is one image of a face cool and another not cool? Maybe.

When is a tree not just a tree? When it is used as a concept for something else.

There are lots of interesting examples, but you get the idea.

People search for images in many ways; literally, laterally, thematically, intuitively and often chaotically. We need to develop an ever expanding suite of useful techniques and technologies to support smart ways of finding images and other products.

In short, Our job is to help designers to find the one among the many, to show what they can’t describe, or to illustrate what they can’t imagine.

To accomplish this, we want to hire a number of enthusiastic and very clever IT professionals (tattoos are optional) to work as part of a strong programming team to support our back office infrastructure and to develop a world class website. Going forward we plan to expand the range of products and services that we offer on a global basis. It’s a fast moving target in a very dynamic industry.

NO PHONE CALLS PLEASE. If we're interested, we'll call you.

About the Company
Masterfile is a visual content provider - a stock image agency/library who license a growing collection of images, photos and illustrations for controlled use around the world. With a head office located in Toronto, satellite sales offices in Seattle, New York and Chicago, and a network of strategic alliances in 35 other countries, we are the largest stock library in Canada and a major player internationally.

Updated: 2008.04.01