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Pixart same fot me last week was better than usual with a sale everyday, thing I used to have in July, we will see next week

We are lucky that we have phildate as a contributor to this group; his latest observation is that sales are 'almost back to where they were before V2'.  He is of course one of the biggest selling photographers at FT along with Andresr, Yuri and Iryana Kurhan.

My own sales have been improving every week.

It is very difficult to compare the situation now with July and August, simply because V2 coincided with the summer lull; it's impossible to tell whether the improvement is because of increased business activity or 'fixes' to the system.

To be fair to Fotolia, ever since I have been a member there, there has always been a warning notice on the upload confirmation page that 'the most important keywords should appear first' and of course there is the sliding box thing to allow for reordering.  Any contributor who ignored that notice should kick themselves rather than Fotolia.  Of course it isn't made clear that only the first seven words will count.

I suspect that editing keywords after upload doesn't actually work.  To be absolutely sure that an image is in the library with the best keywords in the top seven, the best bet is to delete from the database and upload again.

Being on FT, it is like playing on the lottery , you never know when you gonna win 

Yes, the search engine is not perfect, but sales are great. First week of october, was better than july and august together for me! On workdays I have 7-15 sales, on weekends 2-3, and I am happy with that. My goal is to earn 300$ in october, and I am keeping my fingers crossed to acomplish that, so we shall see...

Congrats on the sales!  Sounds like you are doing great there.  And don't get me wrong, my sales are great there as well.  The first week of Oct. was probably my best there yet.  But think how much better those sales might have been had their search engine worked properly.  For them to just ignore the problem is simply unacceptable.

Yep, their search function is still flawed regardless if your first seven keywords are the most relevant.

I can verify the keyword reorder works. I reordered some of my keywords and downaloads literally came to a dead stop. After a couple of weeks I'm now starting to get downloads again. Seems like it takes a while for their search engine to reindex any changes.

Also seems that it doesn't search keywords that are entered as phrases ("hands typing" as opposed to "hands,typing"). And even if you have individial keywords but are missing one word in a search phrase such as "on" (hands typing on laptop), it doesn't work.

This is what I reported to FT, when they contacted me the other day.  I tried the same searches in different languages.

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http://us.fotolia.com/id/4120421 first keywords are "heart" and "German" :
- "German heart" in FT-US or FT-UK, it appears (total two images, one is mine)
- "corazón alemán" in FT-ES, save as above
- "coração alemão" in FT-BR or FT-PT, nothing returns
- "coeur allemand" in FT-FR, also nothing returns
- "deutsche herz" in FT-DE, returns 14 images, none is mine
- "cuore tedesco" in FT-IT, same as FT-DE
 
Another image, older, prior to V2: http://br.fotolia.com/id/884665, where "cereal", "granola" and "strawberry" are among the seven first keywords:
- "granola" in FT-US, none of my images among the 59 that the search tool finds
- "granola" in FT-BR returns 8370 images (none of mine among the first 160, and many don't seem right)
- "cereal strawberry" in FT-US returns 85 images (my 4 in the first page)
- "cereal morango" in FT-BR returns exactly the same images as in FT-US

Yes, good views and increasingly buoyant sales.

Sales at FT are going well for me, too. I'm already at $100+ this month - it usually takes about three weeks to reach this point.

Site is getting faster all the time and sales are picking up to levels before V2. I have always had a soft spot for FT and now upload quite a bit of exclusive stuff for them. I like having the option of setting my own prices for the exclusive stuff.