We’ve got used to CEPIC, the umbrella organisation of European picture agencies, speaking in superlatives and this time was no exception: "A record this year!", announced Alan Smith with reference to the 625 delegates representing 375 companies in the picture industry that had come to the 11th Congress in the Danish capital.

These are the cold facts, but what was the atmosphere like in Copenhagen? After all, the general feeling at the biggest congregation of image distribution companies must be a good indicator of the overall state of the industry. In this respect, the barometer pointed to "Business as usual".

This might not seem very spectacular at first glance, but it is when you take a second look. Consider what has happened in the last few years. In Budapest in 2002, the business was in deep recession, and even normally cheerful souls were walking around with their heads hung low. The contrast could not have been greater at the Lisbon Congress twelve months later, when the atmosphere was palpably euphoric. The international economy (leaving Germany and Italy aside) had been kickstarted and there was a general belief that the industry was out of the woods.

What about Copenhagen? On the shores of the Baltic Sea, a most astonishing thing happened: delegates behaved as though the most serious media crisis since the end of the second world war had never occurred. Most of the damage seems to have been repaired and everyone has resumed their daily business, so we appear to be back to normal.

Remarkably, a large number of companies invested  large sums at a time when cash was in short supply, most of the money going into digitisation hardware and software rather than pictures. Everyone has now installed a shiny new database together with the necessary software, inputted their images (duly keyworded to enable clients to locate them online) and gained initial experience with regard to importing and exporting their partner agencies’ stock material. So what do they need now? The answer is: as many pictures as possible – after all, their database enables them to do so. They have invested large quantities of capital and manpower and now they need to recoup that investment by really broadening the range of material available.

The Copenhagen Congress thus became a kind of marriage market: "Wanted: attractive partner with large quantities of pictures. Traditional stock, rights managed preferred!" And those looking for that partner came from all five inhabited continents. It was taken for granted that agencies from the new EU member states would be making their first visit, but more conspicuous was the attraction now exerted by the CEPIC Congress on Asian and, in particular, American agencies. They too were out to court someone – but who should they tie the knot with? The problem is that so much money has been put into bits and bytes in the last few years that little was left over for producing new material. We can leave the royalty-free suppliers out of this discussion because they stayed on the ball and, as the real winners in the industry crisis, have increased their output enormously in the last two to three years. What has become scarce is good to very good rights-managed material in a modern pictorial language, especially in the sectors with a brisk turnover, such as People, Lifestyle, Beauty and Business.

The interdependence of rights-managed and royalty- free was highlighted by Rainer Erdmann of archivberlin: "We offer 125,000 RF and 25,000 RM images. It is entirely possible in practice that clients see an attractive RF image but then decide to acquire a licence to use a similar RM shot, so we will be increasing our range at this level". This means that archivberlin – like so many other agencies – has a problem in finding exclusive RM partners that are not only able to provide quantity but also quality. "We can’t locate 30,000 to 100,000 RM images from first-class international agencies as quickly as we can in the field of RF material." However, for some people quality seemed to be more a secondary issue. The main rule in the Copenhagen Games was: "Go for quantity!" Thomas Wild, of LOOK, went straight to the point: "The first question is always ‘How many digital images do you have?’" Anyone with less than 50,000 looked down to the floor in shame and hardly dared to mention the figure! The databases are hungry and now want to get plenty of digital material down them. The "content era" has arrived, so photographs are slowly becoming scarce ...

What does the future hold for an industry where digitisation will soon result in everyone having everything for sale? How do the agencies, as companies and intermediaries that the picture buyers deal with, intend to ensure they have a distinctive image among their clients? There has been an explosive increase in the number of pictures available from individual agencies but the trouble is everyone is exploding in the same direction, or rather in every direction.

Georg Hodeck, of the Czech agency ISIFA, even forecasts that people will think back to tried and tested distribution strategies: "I think agencies will go back to producing catalogues next year. In 2001 and 2002, the market was simply saturated, so that’s why production collapsed. People will go back to the catalogue because it’s still the best way of presenting oneself and one’s photographs to one’s clients.

In fact, many people are itching to produce a new one."