MicrostockGroup

Is it ok to post the pictures that I have on microstock sites on flickr as well? 

I had my PAID Flickr subscription canceled without notification probably because of links in the picture description to RF sites. 25$ down the drains. Just avoid Flickr. I had about a thousand free geotagged travel/landmark photos there, all gone. Since then, I even avoid Yahoo, except to drain their free services like email with unlimited net storage.

For 30 bucks you can get a pro account on Fotki with unlimited uploads by FTP. You can even download your stuff by FTP if you loose it. I signed up a couple of months ago and I'm pretty happy so far. You can integrate your Fotki gallery into your website. Here is my Fotki site

http://asianimage.fotki.com/

I didn't think this mattered to most people here, so I didn't post it. "Dear AT&T Internet Service member:

As an AT&T Internet member, you currently receive a free Flickr Pro (a Yahoo! company) account as part of your service. However, beginning January 31, 2009, your free Flickr Pro account will be changing to a free Flickr account, which has some differences and limits. You can read more about the differences at: http://www.flickr.com/help/limits " And this When you have a free Flickr account, you can upload 100MB worth of photos each calendar month. This is a bandwidth limit, and not an amount of space that you have on Flickr servers.

I don't have a Flickr account, have no desire to start one, don't use the formerly included ATT&T Yahoo account. I have my own website which costs about $100 a year, which gives me complete control over materials, storage and what anyone else can see or download.

Keeping control of ones own photos means, that once something is out in the wild, being sold on Micro for 25c to a dollar, and it has sold RF, the photographer pretty much loses control of what's done with their photos. You don't know who bought it or where it's being used. As we've seen here, the also leads to some abusive uses, theft, being merged into CD collections and some stockpiling for the future, which none of us will ever be able to track or control. That's what losing control means. 

I only upload photos that I feel are "stock" enough and generic, for RF use on Microstock sites. Letting go is part of giving up control. That's what Microstock ends up being. Giving up control and selling your images. If I think it's something different, then it goes up RM or licensed.
 
After Photoshelter going out of stock and the recent non-success of new stock sites, micro, macro and storage like DRR... I don't know why SmugMug would want to get into stock. They are a nice, well run site. Perhaps someone there has a death wish? 

Nice site, and free image hosting. This is a test... nice subject, sensor sizes.

I got the same message from Flickr as an AT&T customer. I  I currently have two free Flickr Pro accounts, but now that I have to pay, I will keep only one as I have thousands of pictures there. I use it for personal pictures only, not for stock. I can use the free acount for stock as I want to have examples of my stock photos there, for increased visibility. of course, everything in small sizes and watermarks.

I was really not happy with what Yahoo and AT&T did. It's really bad when they take an existing service (Flickr Pro) and not offer it anymore, for the same monthly fee.

This is the short version of a much longer story. Prodigy Internet was purchased by SBC. At that point they dropped some free account services and features, including killing the Communities, forums, chat and special interest groups, which were one of the attractions for many people. At that point Yahoo became the content provider. Yahoo groups are horrible, tragically lame, difficult to navigate and poorly organized. Shortly after becoming SBC/Yahoo, it became AT&T, but the email servers and front pages are now yahoo. They don't add much, but they keep taking away. For those who might look, I'm still a AT&T DSL customer, because I like the service and the price, but they have a long history of changing things, mostly removing services and features.

Back in the early days of trying to find ways to make more money, Prodigy Dialup started charging for email. Ha, was that a killer. Some dimwit in accounting didn't see that the members would flee the service, and that sure was poorly thought out move.

I don't know that removing the formerly free Flikcr account will have the same effect, but for people who used it, it sure stinks.

I uploaded a photo on Flickr after it was rejected by all microstock agencies. Within 3 days I was contacted by a news agency, asking to buy it. So I sold the photo after all.

Wow, thanks RacePhoto for pointing this out, I missed this "little" note as it is not written there in the main paragraph about limits of the free account. I already renew one Pro account that I had for free, but now I'm thinking what to do with the other one. I didn't mind having two different ones so far as they were for free, but to pay for both it might be too much.