Looking for Competitors to Image Locations?
Giggster is a modern location agency like Image Locations that offers a large library of locations perfect for filming, photography, and events.
Tracking down a professional rental space that fits the needs of your production or event can be a stressful and challenging exercise. Giggster's agency-level services "Giggster Concierge" makes this process much easier by providing an experienced professional location agent to coordinate the entire booking process and provide guidance on additional services such as permits and insurance and general advice related to negotiating budgets and contracts. While everyone has their preferences, we think our team and service stacks up pretty well against similar competitors.
Professional filming locations come in all shapes and sizes. In addition to representing the type of locations listed by traditional agencies (typically those with daily rates of over $2,000), we’re also proud to offer thousands of owner-represented locations with starting rates as low as $30 per hour. As a result of this wide price range, and our policy of listing EVERY property we think has filming potential, Giggster owns one of the most diverse and easily searchable libraries in the 'production locations for rent' industry.
A Modern Competitor to Image Locations
Location agencies like Image Locations were built in a different era of Hollywood. pre-dating Youtube and Instagram. Their business model caters to large budget producers and union location scouts with total production budgets in the $20k - $100k range. Unlike more modern services like Giggster, which cater to all types of projects, Image is best designed to serve professional location renters where specific budgets are less important than getting "the look". While their library provides plenty of compelling options and exclusives it can be challenging to find more off-beat spaces, or locations that have never been shot before.
With less than 1,000 total locations (compared to Giggster's near 6,000) the possibilities of not just finding a hospital, but the perfect hospital for your creative vision and budget, can be a lot more difficult. While you can filter locations by custom keywords, with less keywords, and a reliance on manual keyword indexing (i.e. manually entering keyword for each location) the overall functionality of search is significantly more limited than with Giggster. As a renter, this leads to more time spent manually reviewing photos, emailing and on the phone with location agents, and driving around the city on unnecessary location scouts.
In addition to boasting a really large location library, one of Giggster's other big advantages is the flexibility of full text search. You can use it the same way as Image Locations, to find preset category tags like "house", "los angeles", or "church" but you can also type in a lot of other random words with impressive results.
Rather than rely on our agents to type in tags to describe every new property listed on the site, Giggster's search tool pulls words directly from image titles and descriptions written by the property owner. As of January 2020, this gives Giggster 4,742 individual search terms to pull from.
Rent a location for your next film or photo shoot project on Giggster – A better way to book locations.
Brands See Giggster as an Ideal Alternative to Agencies
Earlier this year ethical e-commerce brand Reformation reached out to Giggster for a photoshoot looking for a large church property that also had an office trailer. While many Giggster clients like to start their search for themselves on our platform, Reformation were familiar with Giggster's agency-level concierge services and contacted the Giggster team directly with their request.
Giggster's professional location agency services (managed by veteran agent Kelsii Dyer) maintains a 1 hour average response time to all qualified booking inquiries, and was able to get back to the Reformation team in less than 30 minutes. Giggster provided a custom project folder with a range of church locations and office locations that matched with the clients mood board. One of top choices in the project folder matched their creative vision, and they were able to complete the booking process in only a few hours.
Need help for your production? Giggster offers the industry’s best customer service with 24/7 phone and messaging support.
A Friendly and Helpful LA-Based Team
Planning a production or event can be a hassle, and we’re here to help. We review all booking inquiries and will be there to intervene and lend assistance if anything goes wrong. From last-minute cancellations to issues with card payments, to uncooperative neighbors, our local team is always just a phone call away. If you have a larger budget (typically around $2500 and above), we also offer full end-to-end concierge services, including help with pricing negotiations, permit coordination, insurance, and the hiring of on-site representatives.
Giggster is trusted by leading film and production companies, photographers, fashion brands and commercial agencies.
Giggster works with a diverse list of production companies, agencies, and freelance content creators as well as big name brands such as Netflix, Disney, Hulu, Snapchat, TNT, NBC Universal, H&M, Adidas, Spotify, Playboy, Valentino, Marc Jacobs, Louis Vuitton, and Neiman Marcus. Our popularity and reputation within the higher end of the location market allow us great leverage with top-tier location owners in Los Angeles and New York.
Affordable fashion retailer Michael Kors has shot with Giggster on multiple occasions, using our properties for a number of large seasonal collections. In May 2018, one of the producers on their team had reached a roadblock when the owner of their top location choice decided to triple their day rate with the expectation that Michael Kors would have the budget to afford it. Our team intervened, leveraging our knowledge of the owner's past accepted bookings, to negotiate a total shoot budget of almost $11,000 less than the owner's previous minimum offer.
Better Data, Bigger Savings.
One of the most significant differences between Giggster and other competitor location services like Image Locations is our technology. In addition to a streamlined website and talented customer support service, we have a dedicated team of back-end engineers, data scientists, and professional writers working to surface useful data to help you find better, less trafficked, and more affordable location options. One of our largest ongoing projects has been analyzing over a decade of production data from LA's largest permitting service, FilmLA.
From this permit data we’ve been able to get a clearer understanding of the Los Angeles location industry and surface some cool stats: for example, we know that in the past ten years there have been over 150,200 on-location shoots with 55 different zip codes that have attracted at least 100 shoots per year. We also have detailed lists of individual locations (including those not represented by Giggster) and can provide guidance on finding undiscovered spaces as well as locations that are more laid-back about permit requirements.
Find the right place faster - 94% of our hosts have an average response rate of under than 24 hours.
In addition to having an impressive location library and best-in-class search tools, we have an incredibly responsive community of hosts and a variety of messaging tools that make communication a breeze. All of our hosts can be reached directly on the platform, and once you make initial contact, you can manage all messaging through your phone thanks to our text-to-reply feature.
With text-to-reply, Giggster automatically links your messaging inbox with the phone number on your account, so you can manage multiple inquiries without ever needed to log-in. This feature also helps keep our hosts responsive, as they will receive an immediate text notification whenever you reach out.
Complete peace of mind regardless of budget, project or crew size.
Producing a film shoot or an event can be a stressful process. At Giggster we’ve tried to streamline the process, by serving as an all-in-one destination to coordinate bookings, manage permits, purchase insurance and source third-party vendors like matting and catering services. We keep these add-ons 100% optional, allowing you to cater the level of support to the demands of each project.
If anything ever does go wrong, our team of location agents are here to ensure that your investment is protected and that the hosts always adhere to the terms of the location contract. All of Giggster’s location payments are managed through the platform, providing an extra level of security against faulty claims and potential disputes.
While these types of scenarios are few and far, it’s always nice to have a safety net in place. Giggster’s best-in-class renter protection services and on-demand support, are a key differentiator from our competition, and one of the reasons why we’re trusted by the industry’s top photographers, agencies and brands.