hi one question do you make money with markedshot? i have a small portfolio there but i dont want to upload more pics there if the sales are not good

I just started uploading to Markedshot a few weeks ago, only a few images, no sales yet.

funny enough your figures show that there is no right or wrong regarding micro or macro. your micro photo did better than your macro photos. and you never know how they would have performed were they swapped.

I wouldn't support that statement. I am rather convinced, the micro photo would not have sold on macrostock. I doubt there would be many people spending $100 or more on an image like that these days. That image is very exchangable with those of other contributors, there is plenty material on micro. The macro images are rather unique, each in their own way. They probably would have sold on microstock as well but I doubt that they would have generated 400-500 downloads like the push pins or the isolated grass.

At least that's what I make myself believe when I decide which images go where.

Hey everybody,

i have an issue i don�t unterstand. When i upload images in portrait orientation to 123RF and iStock they show up in wrong orientation and get rejected of course. On Shutterstock there is no problem.

In Windows Explorer and other viewing tools they are shown up correctly. Turning them in different rotations and back doesn�t help.

Maybe someone can help me with that?

Rainer

So far I have seen cases only when shooting with mobile phones. The orientation isn't stored properly in the EXIF data of the image. You need to run them through a proper photo editor and save them again.

I'm not familiar with how Westend works but many of these types of secondary agencies work with multiple other agencies like Getty. So they may be able to get your work into other agencies that you may not have been accepted into by yourself.

Yes. I have images in Offset, Fotolia Infinite, had them at Corbis through Westend61. And I regularly get sales in from agencies that I have never heard of, from Japan, South Korea, Sweden...

And it's not just about "having images at Getty". As everywhere it's also about search ranking. Westend61 has a very tight selection of images, and in exchange they are ranked pretty good.

Stocksy started with a good financial-back-up, probably the best expertise team you get, great marketing and couple of hand-selected very good photograhper and still it took about two years to take it off

Stocksy also started with a quite large bunch of photographers who trusted the management enough from the start to submit images exclusively with them i.e. partly removing them from existing sites where they had a sales track record in exchange for an uncertain future.

I'd say this level of trust is hard to gain for someone with no track record in the industry. And actually I'd say MicroStockGroup overall seems not to be the right place to search for contributors who would put in this kind of trust into a new agency.

So I am seeing more and more processed (lightly) washed out social website inspired content make it onto SS. I was wondering if anyone had a preset that makes it through SS inspection for a well exposed "normal" image. If not, I will start playing around with one and share if there is interest.

Really? Where you have you been? You need to catch up on lens flares as well.

For information, there is no invoice and no agreement delivered with these (unintended) purchases of extended licenses, neither by email nor on my online account. Probably because the credits used came from my sales as contributor and not added when buying pack as customer...

Well, I just checked and it wasn't hard to find the link to all the image purchases I have made from Fotolia: https://www.fotolia.com/Member/PurchasedContents/All

It includes a list of sizes, price and a link to the license. And yes, I have made those purchases from the credits I have earned selling my own images.

Also I agree with what Jo Ann showed in her screen shot: The price is clearly stated, the X license is actually separated with a thick line from the regular licenses (which are all at 0 credits in any size) and it defaults to the L license which is free. So in my opinion this is clearly the error of a user who didn't pay attention to what he is doing.

And you end up complaining about it in a public forum instead of first trying to sort it out with the agency apparently. You may see it differently but when I clearly make a mistake, I first try to sort it out myself and not complain about others making it easy for me to make that mistake.

How much income % do I stand to lose by ending exclusivity with iStock?

No one can make a good prediction. If you are going down from 40% to 19%, you would lose half of the credit royalties; apparently these days, images don't change collection, so your images would (probably?) stay in the Signature collection at 3 credits. If that wasn't the case, you'd not only cut the royalties in half but also get that half based on only 1 instead of 3 credits. You will also lose more than half of your royalties from subscriptions (from 0.75 and 2.50 down to 0.28 per download). You will also lose the income from GI Sales. New images will go into the Essentials collection at a lower price point but might get more downloads compared to older images. New images will also go in the partner program, another way to make a few more downloads but most of them for 0.28 each.

As you can see, it is rather complicated. And it doesn't help much not knowing how much you are going to earn on other sites as well.

My personal journey that way began three and a half years ago. It took me only six months to get back to the same amount of royalties I have made at iStock as an exclusive in 2012. But I must say that I already had seen a steep decline in sales from 2010 to 2012, so I was already "at the bottom". Since I started distributing my images in 2013, most libraries have doubled their size, so I keep fighting against more and more competition everywhere. Uploading takes quite a bit more time as I upload to eight agencies actively now (though not even close to eight times what you are used to at iStock, that is by far the most time consuming upload process). Also, you have to start at other agencies from scratch, working your way up in the ranking, search positions, royalty levels. It's not plain and simple to start elsewhere, it takes time, a lot of time.

For me things worked out pretty well but mostly because becoming non-exclusive required me to not just upload my existing portfolio to Shutterstock, Fotolia and others but also improve my photography and find new and higher priced outlets for the images that just don't do well in microstock. If your plan is to just spread all your images across as many agencies as possible, I have my doubts if you would make significant returns.

Interesting to note, that even with all the subs and low priced apparent sales, my income per sale calculation shows a steady rise. Now running in the $10 per sale range. It had risen to the $4 range in late 2010, fallen to $3 in late 2011, and started moving up again. I'm iS Exclusive at 30%.

I am not sure but I have a feeling that you are looking at the wrong numbers somehow. As subs and partner downloads (so basically all the cheap ones) are being reported with a month delay, it seems easy to only see the average regular sale. My partner is also still exclusive with iStock at the 40% level but her average download value has dropped to $3 this year (from $4 last year and $12 in 2013).

I couldn't see a reason why your average sale would still be in the $10 range as with the exception of EL's and the very few large GI Sales, the $10 is what you can get for single image sales but all subs are paying only $0.75/2.50, so the average must be lower than $10.

(yeah, for the record: $3 average per sale is still four times more than what I make as a non-exclusive in microstock, so iStock exclusives are still at an advantage despite all the negative changes)

What's up with Shutterstocks 30MB limit? I started uploading there few days ago, for now just 3D renders from Blender and i noticed that 30MB limit on picture size and some of my best pictures are larger than 30MB. Shouldnt be in their interest to have better images?

And one more question, I was robably making pictures in too high resolution (9600x7000), what's optimal resolution?

You really think that wave pattern flags needs to be 70 megapixels? After reading your post, I was excited to click on your portfolio links because I was expecting to see some high-end rendering of futuristic cityscapes or interior design/architecture as I have seen from some other artists. But seriously, why would you think those images would get "better" just because you blow them up even further?

Today I had to pull the noise removal slider all the way to 70 in Lightroom and there is still noise.

This was taken with less light in my kitchen. ISO 80. I never higher.

I am not sure what you are doing wrong but you are doing something wrong. I just checked back the images I shot with the RX100III two years ago. Noise becomes visible at ISO 400 and noticable at ISO 800 but still is managable. I just put noise reduction to 25 in LR for the ISO 800 images and it's fine.

However, you are talking about soft focus and loss of detail and the low light in your kitchen which leads me to think that your problem isn't actually noise but proper exposure. Noise becomes a bigger problem in the shadow areas and especially if you are trying to raise the light in post processing. Maybe that's where things are going wrong?

If not, I'd say show us a sample image with a 100% crop and include the EXIF data.

why would a co-op report sales publicly? how does any agency pay 55% of gross collected revenue when royalty rates are 50%?

i smell a rat.

I smell it, too. But the smell reminds me more of envy than anything animal.

Nope. The trick is "250 per week". Shutterstock sells subscription for $199/month and it's 750 images. $0,26 per unit. See the difference? 0,26 vs 0,07.

Shutterstock pays me 38 cents per download, so they must be giving away money for free then.

Or: Your logic calculating the "xxx per image" is flawed because no customer actually downloads that many images after all. It doesn't make a difference if you make it 25 per day, 750 per month, 250 per week. You could actually sell subscriptions for "one million images per day" and it still wouldn't change how many images are actually being downloaded.