...and, by the way, lots of removed files are not similar at all to anything I have in my port... and lots of them are new files, too - didn't have a chance to sell yet.

And the files that were removed were "approved by accident".

Accidental approval.  Yes, this is a new one.

Does this practice actually improve the overall site and sales for the company? I doubt it.

Also the idea of "accidental" approvals is silly. How old do they think you are? If your are moving ahead with such a policy at least have the ba**s to call it what it is.

This getting ridiculous, they took off some of mine as well for insane reasons.

The kicker is that they keep approving low quality images while deletimg high quality "similars".

I dont get it.

Just implement a search feature like Alamy does which groups similars automatically into a lightbox kind of search results page.

The contributor has no extra work and the search results are not cluttered with pages and pages of similars.

Dreamstime is doing it the hard way/cheap way.

Surprised so many have been removed from one of the top sellers! 

They are only removing files with no sales though aren't they?  I haven't received my notice yet, I know it's coming though!

From Achilles in the Dreamstime forum:
Starting today we will begin to select portfolios that are dramatically affected by this issue and clean them of blatant similars, identicals, flipped images and small angle variations that have 0 downloads. We will try to be gentle but some users will see a significant amount of content being removed. Once they are reviewed they will be removed without refusals being counted in the approval ratio.

Strange indeed they call them 'accidentally approved' while its obviously only about the new similars policy...

Do you have a link for the thread?

Quote from: Artemis on April 18, 2011, 10:53

From Achilles in the Dreamstime forum:
Starting today we will begin to select portfolios that are dramatically affected by this issue and clean them of blatant similars, identicals, flipped images and small angle variations that have 0 downloads. We will try to be gentle but some users will see a significant amount of content being removed. Once they are reviewed they will be removed without refusals being counted in the approval ratio.

Strange indeed they call them 'accidentally approved' while its obviously only about the new similars policy...

Do you have a link for the thread?

Half way down:

http://www.dreamstime.com/forumm_26339_pg7

Half way down:

http://www.dreamstime.com/forumm_26339_pg7

Thanks!

Well, dont flame me but actually I approve of this kind of action if its justyfied that is ( dont know about Elena though) .  Clogging up the files in an agency is IMO, one of the chief reasons why we have this terrible state at the moment, I bet all in all with the entire Micro world, some 60% could be removed and leave 40% of relevant, not copycats material.

It really depends on how is it implemented. Are we talking scalpel or rusty hacksaw? Like someone said above, it would be nice if they came up with a better solution like grouping similars as collections in the search instead of just rejecting them.

Quote from: stockastic on April 18, 2011, 09:53

I expect more of this sort of thing in the future, as the microstocks start to accept the fact that their search results can't be much better than they already are, unless they start to actually sort through those millions of images, deleting repetitious junk and spam keywords.   And they might very well hire new people to do this, and not give them much training, so lots of mistakes will be made.

500 images?  Obviously no one actually looked at all of them and made intelligent decisions. Someone is just in there swinging an axe.

This is what I am thinking. And I know that from a contributor's standpoint, this stinks. But I do believe it will be an improvement for buyers. Having to wade through two or three pages of images that are so similar, one has difficulty finding the difference, is really annoying and never should have happened in the first place. I understand the concept of similars, as we have discussed in the past, and in that context I agree that similars are useful.

Like stockastic says, it might be people with little or no training, going overboard. There never seems to be a happy medium anymore with micros.  

Simply wrong. As said in other threads I buy arround 100 - 150 images each month. It takes me 2 sec to overlook a page of results and many times I have to download various "similars" to find the right ones. Dreamstime just doesn`t understand designers needs.

Imagine you need an isolated to be placed on a 480x120 web banner and need the right angle to represent a project nicely. Imagine you need an 4000x1000 cut for a quarter page print add, lets say a smiling girl with a wood in the background. In one image she may stand in a Angle or the shot has a angle that the person is cutted badly in this format. In another one there is not enough wood over the head of the girl to place the desired text. I could give MILLIONS of those examples. And finally we contributors notice too when a whole series of one shooting gets downloaded. Dreamstime is jsut unprofessional. Nothing else.

Simply wrong. As said in other threads I buy arround 100 - 150 images each month. It takes me 2 sec to overlook a page of results and many times I have to download various "similars" to find the right ones. Dreamstime just doesn`t understand designers needs.

You should contact them and let them know.  These types of comments will mean more coming from a designer than from a rank-and-file contributor.