A commercial arrangement / contract exists between the contributor and Dreamstime and between Dreamstime and the eventual downloader of the image.  There is no such relationship between the contributor and the downloader.  The customer pays a fee to Dreamstime and Dreamstime give you a small cut of this i.e. they are paying you.  Therefore, in any meaningful sense, Dreamstime is your customer (actually the payment arrangement seems more like an employer / employee relationship).  Now, as pointed out in another thread, the rejected images may sell like hotcakes elsewhere but, most likely, instead of, rather than in addition to, other images already there, so you feel the loss - but they don�t.  I�ve seen nothing to indicate the guys running these sites are stupid so if they won�t accept both landscape & portrait it�s from choice rather than ignorance possibly with reference to the supply already available.
velocicarpo
I�m around long enough to know that �with respect� means the opposite :-D  I�ve have absolutely no reason to doubt what you say � if you�re actually making a living doing this you must be pretty good.  However, this is a matter of commerce, not photography / 3D/ illustration.  Do you actually think ANY commercial organisation actually gives a rat�s ass about quality as long as they are moving product?  Have you seen the absolute crap that fills the TV schedules and music charts?  Do you really think cheap and cheerful stock photography is any different?
Pixart
You�re dead right � 10, 20 images for the price of 1?  Talk about giving people enough rope....

Wow. OK, newsflash, stock agencies are NOT our employers they're middlemen. Photographers are the suppliers, buyers are the customers and the agency is the retail store that sells our product to the customers. We DO NOT work for them and they are NOT our customer. It's more like a symbiotic relationship: without product to sell they would have to shut down and while we can sell our product direct, it's far far easier simply to use an already established venue like dreamstime to do all the grunt work of running a retail business for a cut of the profit. They take the lion's share which is another issue altogether but that's how it works.

They decide what product they represent (accepting or rejecting images) but to do that they use low paid editors that don't have a clue what to look for so instead they follow strict guidelines which leave little room to think or use judgement. i.e. this images looks alot like that image so it's too similar according to the rules, reject it.

Even if the argument for similars had any weight, buyers are ALWAYS looking for fresh material on particular subjects so keeping the same image in the catalog for years seems less productive than presenting fresh shots.

Having said that, I have a collage in my port that is a collection of images that, on their own, have little strength but together are very strong and fill a niche occupied by only one other image as competition. Makes for excellent sales. So collages do have their place.

... It's more like a symbiotic relationship:...

How come they make all the rules than?

... Photographers are the suppliers, buyers are the customers and the agency is the retail store that sells our product to the customers....

That�s pretty much QED as far as I�m concerned.     If I buy a bar of soap (even smelly noobs occasionally buy soap) from a shop, as far as I�m concerned, and legally, I�m a customer of the shop not the manufacturer of the soap.  Of course there is inconsistency and good and bad reviewers - every organisation has good and bad staff.  I�d bet my last cigarette though that the kind of policy we�re talking about comes from on high and the reviewers are working to pretty strict guidelines.  On the collages front, what has competition of dozens or even hundreds now will shortly have competition of thousands  .  I hope at least the folks doing these keep the dimensions to whatever they would normally do for a single image.

velocicarpo, I think that this is as simple as putting a valve mechanism in place.  It�s probably easier and cheaper to control the flow at the review stage than to do something about the stuff already on site.  I can�t really see why a cull like you suggest wouldn�t work unless the kind of subject matter being rejected is actually selling pretty well already and may not be affected by such a cull � who knows?

Ithn,  IS aside, the other sites seem pretty flexible about stuff that�s slightly different � in fact probably easier than submitting more standard stock.  Upside is high acceptance and low competition for sales.  Downside is a much smaller potential market.

Hi Louis,
no, you shouldn't be doing any collages, (unless the images call for such a composition), and you're absolutely right to be annoyed.
I'm not sure where this 'make collages' story comes from (a request from a confused buyer perhaps), but it's not right and you shouldn't be doing it.
I'm not a designer (I work for a small print house) and although we have thousands of images on our hard drives, there's barely a collage or two (Yuri's I believe). I like to have full control over the way I position my images, and more often than not collages don't fit the bill.
We don't really buy them
Don't do it

I like Dreamstime a lot and I can only hope they'll change their minds about this 'make collages' affair soon enough
That's before they upset most of you.

They're not going to do sh_t because Serban is inflexible.  That collage thing is a disgraceful suggestion to the contributors.

At least the old stuff that sells gets higher prices over time, so my not uploading hasn't hit my earnings too badly.  It gives me time to upload new stuff to sites that are more contributor friendly.  I have absolutely no interest in doing collages for one site.  The others would soon insist on them if it worked for DT and we really would be in an even worse situation.