I don�t think anyone has mentioned this site yet, I just saw it mentioned on Twitter and decided to check it out. https://www.stockai.com/ This is a stock site giving away free AI generated stock photos. I had a quick look through. You will find people with 5 arms here and there, or a dog with a human mouth. But other than some really obvious AI errors, there�s so far a lot of beautiful photos on there.

I see the race to the bottom has really accelerated.

Quote from: charged on June 06, 2020, 13:18

2. I don�t keyword in Lightroom, I use Bridge. Never had a problem using Bridge. The title field in Bridge is called Headline. Headline is the real metadata field name embedded in the IPTC.

Just curious why you prefer Bridge to Lightroom. I've only used Lightroom all these years.

I've always used Bridge would the main answer. I have seen how Lightroom does keywording and it looks no where near as easy as Bridge. I have thousands of pre-saved keywords in Bridge, when I need a keyword on a subject matter, I just do a search and find it in the keyword tree in Bridge.

I really don't understand this attitude.

I'm a fellow SS contributor who's also affected by this cut of royalty, but i still fail to see how SS is responsible for the current economic hardships of that alleged single mother or anyone else here. SS is a business not a charity. We are not employees, we are just contracted freelancers, and SS as an organization has zero responsibility towards us. They never made any promises and you are free to terminate your contract any time. The only reason you don't is because the rest of the agencies are just as crap or worse. A few agencies who are committed to fair trade, like pond5 or alamy, don't sell sh*, so it doesn't matter that they give you 40 to 60% of nothing. SS remained the only big one that actually sells and now it's gone too. I don't count istock/getty. The business landscape keeps shifting.

Let's face it: creating stock is a skill of very little added value, at least according to the market. No one cares how long it took you to learn photography and how much you spent on gear. Photography is extremely hard to sell even outside stock, otherwise we wouldn't bother selling for 20 cents a pop. As for me, i just stopped uploading and don't care any more.

It's not SS management's mistake that the single mother failed to obtain more marketable skills. We are all free to move on. Why would you rely on a single source of income, especially if it's known to be very unreliable?

Shutterstock can do whatever they like, but they can't control the consequences. Such as mass turning off of portfolios. Massive amounts of people taking offense and refusing to add new fresh work to their collection. Massive amounts of people determined to tell all their friends to not buy from Shutterstock. The shaming they are getting on social media. There is also the issue that 10 cent royalties means it is not worth it to create new work for Shutterstock.

SS Wall Street stock is going up today...I wonder why...

You don't understand the stock market at the moment. Most stocks are moving at a value of 0.8 correlation. Versus, 0.35 in normal times. Meaning most stocks are moving up and down fairly correlated to each other at the moment. It has nothing to do with the fundamentals of each stock. Basically stocks move based upon news that are related to the reopening of the US economy. Also watch any stock over days and weeks and months, they move up and down. That is just what stocks do. Even absent news that would move a stock.

As someone else already pointed out, the new CEO has tons of stock options that only vest if he meets target goals, hence, why they are now robbing you lot so the company can increase profit and the CEO will have millions of dollars of options vest and get a great deal of money. CEOs being paid in stock options based upon meeting metrics is pretty common practice. In this instance, it is to your detriment.

iStock still has a ton of exclusive content. All my images are exclusive with iStock. I regularly see late night American TV shows use my images. But yes, I agree it is super important for a stock website to have exclusive images. I remember years ago when microstock was very young and I use to work at a very large ad agency, I would browse several legacy stock websites to search for images. At the time, everyone knew you had to look at several websites because everyone had different images. If I didn't look around, how could I know I got the best image for my project?

Quote from: charged on May 27, 2020, 19:15

I don't have a dog in this fight, because I don't sell on shutterstock, but what they did is pretty crappy.

Why don't the folks that contribute to stocksy talk to the owners of that site, Bruce and ask him to consider launching a new site, for the masses. Just like iStock use to be when he owned it? Bruce knows how to build and launch and run a mega large stock photo site. I doubt anyone else here is going to know how to launch a site and run it properly, because it takes a great deal of knowledge and it takes a great deal of money. Since stock photos pays nothing, following that logic, I know most of you don't make any real money, therefore you guys can't afford to launch a site without someone like Bruce. I could be way of, but based upon my days in a previous life working in digital advertising many years ago, to launch a mega stock site can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Personals websites are cheap, professional websites built for corporations are mega expensive.

actually, getting a site set up is not that expensive, nor that time consuming. a skilled programmer (depending on what complexity you want) can put something together in as little as a couple hours, to a couple months.

the challenge is effective marketing, & converting customers to sales, etc...

How many professional websites have you built? In my past career in digital advertising, I've worked on teams that built the Coca Cola website, New York Jets website, micro sites for Toyota, American Express, Canon, and others. You would be surprised just now many different hands touch a project and how it is easily thousands of billable hours, where every hour is billed at hundred of dollars to the client. This was over ten year ago. The cost to build a professional website is vastly different than building someone's personal blog. I don't know what the staffing is like at Shutterstock, but I can make an uneducated guess. I would guess there is at least 1 if not 2 UI full time person. There would be at least 2 or more full time graphic designer. There would be at least 2 full time developer. There is probably a data scientist that crunches sales data for insight. Then factor in that they are in NYC. You are looking at $700k in salary just to maintain the site. Never mind literally the hundreds of other staff that work there. A professional site is very expensive.

You are making the assumption that Adobe would not follow along at some point.

If it can't be fixed, another option is for you to buy an external hard drive and find some cloning software and clone your entire old machine, then boot it up on your new machine via the external hard drive and use your software there. Or you could replace the OS on your new machine with the OS on the old machine.

I use a mac, so the cloning software I use is superduper. No idea what options are available on PC. I clone my own machine every few months just as a backup.

Hi
and you also find this image out of focus?

In my opinion it is in focus, however, you have an issue with color balance. There is an red-ish tint that is unnatural looking. The composition is also off centered, making the image quite a bit less useful. You cropped off the edge of the plants for no good reason. The verticals and horizontals of the word tiles are not straight. Having seen this image and your previous, I think you still have a lot to learn about shooting stock for advertising purposes. You need to pay attention to what images that are used in advertising look like. That is how you need to shoot. You need to shoot for the customer's needs.

Foreground being out of focus is extremely uncommon. Almost never do you see an image like that in any advertising. There is no clearly no demand for such a shot. Think about your time, you spend time doing something that no one is going to buy. You want to study the market and see what kind of landscape photos buyers actually use. Let that be your guide. Otherwise you just learn the hard way.

Terrible month. *sigh*