MicrostockGroup

It's not likely "unusual objects" would end up paying for the time spent anyways.

Some of these images - that I can't get into IStock due to keywording - are doing pretty well at other sites.  I understand that IS is trying to bring order to the chaos of keywording. But a "vocabulary" has to be expandable, as needed, or it's a dead language.   

They're trying to have their cake and eat it too.  They want to pre-define all the keywords and exercise strict control over how they're applied; but they want the submitters to keep doing the actual work of keywording. If they really want to manage keywording this tightly they should do it themselves. 

Yes exactly.

I guess my point is that for me, anyway, it's just too much work, for just one site, and I'm burned out on it.  If the whole microstock industry could get behind one "controlled vocabulary", then it would make sense. That will never happen of course.

 

Brazilian currency:  http://www.istockphoto.com/file_search.php?action=file&text=%22Brazilian+Currency%22

Makes sense Adelaide. Very few buyers would look for "US Currency" instead of "Dollar". This says how much they care about the whole Brazilian market share. I'm sure we can find many examples like this. They should be grateful that you have tried to make a suggestion at improving the CV.

IS vocabulary is very limited. Many times I wanted to add very logical keywords, and I got stuck. I remember when I tried to add keyword "surface" to my image, but IS suggested only few keywords (water surface, low level point) and I had to delete the keyword.

I have noticed a lot of threads recently about people getting discouraged and giving up submitting to one site or another.

Can't help wondering if this is the intended effect of the tighter standards and increased rejections across the board. 

Maybe the sites are deliberately making it more difficult in order to stem the massive growth of the contributor base?  Sort of thinning the herd?

Keywords shouldn't be that hard. You should have some sort of keywording program like Expression Media or there must be lots others. imbed them in the master image and then use, again Expression Media works fine or Bridge or whatever to output files to the spec required, usually just at native resolution or lowered for some sites. Once you have a master file it can be easily changed or keywords added or deleted as needs dictate. If you have too many keywords or the wrong ones for iS just delete them during upload. The idea is the process is good for all sites and the amount of fiddling is reduced.

Every microstock site will continue to take quality both in terms of technical excellence and image subject because they have no reason not too, to think otherwise is just completely daft. Quality has, does & always will be accepted and sell.

A lot of microstock sites have stopped accepting the crap they used to, that's all that has changed.

I am having problems with DT lately but FT are accepting more.  The sites seem to take it in turns.  They do sometimes reject photos that sell well on other sites and acccept those that never sell.  It is just something we have to put up with. 

Using mostphotos helps, as they have the best reviewer in the business

Sure they do - it costs money to review new images, and their numbers might show that "better" images won't necessarily generate significantly more sales.  If they can reduce the number of reviewers they're paying without significantly impacting sales, they make more money right away. 

These aren't art galleries.   Their sales are probably limited by their crappy search capabilities, more than the quality of their images.  They already have a few roses that are good enough. They'd probably be better off spending time and money weeding out the junk from what they already have, and improving their search algorithms, than reviewing and adding new images.

They won't shut the door completely, though, because if they simply announced they weren't accepting new images, it would be a turnoff for buyers.  What they will do instead is streamline their review process so more stuff gets rejected right off the bat without a close inspection ("welll covered") and increase other barriers to submission.   But they aren't going to keep paying reviewers to do detailed 100% inspections of 50,000 new submissions in a week.

I think if we spoke off the record with some people in the microstocks, many would agree with RT and say "of course we always want new images of better quality than what we have."  But those would be the creative types, and their bean counters would be playing a different tune.