Why does it matter? You're already locked into DT for 6 months. What's another 6, unless you have short-term plans to go exclusive or get out of microstock altogether?

Yep too long, 6 months is too long in my opinion.  Especially with their clauses that they can do ANYTHING they want and you can't leave, I would be cautious about using any site that has a lock in period.  Things can change fast here.

Any lock is too long. We own the images and shouldn't be locked into anything.

True, even the 30-day istock exclusive lock is 30 days too long. But this is microstock and we aren't exactly in the business of working with the best of situations.

That said, unless someone has plans to do something with their images in the next couple of years other than microstock, any sort of lock-in shouldn't have much of an impact on most people. If you know you're not going to go exclusive anywhere or move your images to a different licensing model, any sort of timeframe is of no consequence. I know that probably 5 years from now I'll still be working with most of the same companies I am now, and if I were locked into any of them for a year, it wouldn't stop me from continuing on with them.

I'm not on FP, but this announcement wouldn't change anything for me if I were with them.

I don't see why it has to be as long as 1 year.  I also think we should get an email about important changes like this.  Perhaps I did and I didn't read it.  Has anyone received one?  What happens if someone offers good money to buy an image outright on another site?  Can we delete 1 image from FP or do we have to lose that sale because of this one low earning site?  I don't mind a 3 month lock in, as long as we can still remove some images if it's essential.  Any longer than that and I would want the site to be selling a lot more than FP do.

This is an issue for me and I will stop uploading to FP, as I don't make much there anyway.  To agree to this, they need to be selling more than Dreamstime and I can't see that happening.

Things are changing too fast to justify locking in my files for 1 year at such a very low earner.  I'm done with FeaturePics...

Quote from: ThomasAmby on May 24, 2011, 01:52

If this is an attempt to keep contributors to stay longer and not waste time reviewing large portfolios...

I'm sure that's what it is. They probably just want to prevent people from wasting their time who upload a ton of photos and then delete them a month later. If that's the reason then they need to come up with a better arrangement.

I can understand that they don't want their time wasted, but exactly how much do reviewers get paid? IIRC, one time I inquired about it at a top 5 site who was looking for someone and I think they paid 5 cents per image. A person uploading 3000 images would still only cost them $150.00. Typically, that is stretched out over months. And someone with that many images to upload has probably been in it a while, so likely to start selling right away. So not exactly that big of an investment for agencies.

Anything past 3 months, IMHO, is too long. And mostly the reason people leave a site is because there aren't any sales. Not exactly the contributor's fault.

I don't have a problem with a year lock time...if I owned I site I was get sick of users submitting photo's and then pulling them all down in a few months.  As most underdog sites, it take a while to grow the business and its a waste for both parties.  If someone is considering going exclusive then the shouldn't be uploading to the smaller companies.