About us
We were a photo agency before we were a software company
LightRocket exists because we needed it. Running an agency across three continents meant managing contributors in a dozen time zones, indexing an archive nobody could search, and getting files to clients without losing track of where they ended up.
Our story
The problem we were already living with
We think software should solve the problems the people using it actually have. Ours were specific: contributors working in different countries, an archive far too large to browse, and clients who needed a file immediately without us losing sight of how it was used afterwards.
We are still a media company. Our sister platform at photographers.lightrocket.com hosts websites and archives for working photographers and visual artists, and stores over half a million files. Digital asset management is not a market we moved into. It is what we do every day.
So we know what it takes to index a large archive well enough that someone finds the right frame in seconds. We know what it costs when a file goes out with no record of who shot it or what it was cleared for. And we know that the person doing the tagging usually has three other jobs as well.
All of that went into LightRocket. It is the system we wanted back when we were the ones running the archive.
Meet the founders
Co-founder
Peter Charlesworth
Peter read Film and Photographic Arts in London and taught photography for a while before deciding the darkroom was too small a room to spend a career in. He spent the next year crossing the Middle East and East Africa in an old Land Rover, shooting for charities and environmental organisations.
A commission from Time Magazine in Beirut turned that trip into a long career in photojournalism.
Co-founder
Yvan Cohen
Yvan read politics at SOAS in London with a loose plan to get to Asia and into journalism. An assignment in Bangkok in 1990 provided the opening, and became a career photographing for many of the world’s major publications.
He co-founded LightRocket and still takes any excuse to get out of the office and shoot.
Next step
We’d love to explain more…
Still got questions? Curious to see LightRocket in action? Want to know more about pricing?
We’re always happy to show off our system and, yes, we’ll even help out with discounts and pricing.