MicrostockGroup
Agency Based Discussion => Adobe Stock => Topic started by: AnnaM on October 29, 2016, 12:10
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Today I strongly feel that Fotolia (Adobe) treats customer/contributors like crap!
I have been a contributor at Fotolia for more than a decade now, but two weeks ago I found my account blocked without any reason.
Right after my notice my account got blocked, and I sent them an email at support[at]fotolia.com, & invoice[at]fotolia.com asking them about the reason for which they blocked my account, but unfortunately I haven't received a single reply. To date no explanation have been given.
I lost faith in their customer service after being ignored, I googled to find a solution over internet, in Microstockgroup I have read lots of similar issues. Adobe representative on Microstockgroup asked people with similar issues to send email to him at mhayward[at]adobe.com, I also sent him an email. Again NO REPLY to my email.
My account is blocked for the past two weeks and I am suffering huge loss in revenues.
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Fotolia phone number: 080 0917 0886
Did you try to phone them?
Fotolia page at Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/fotolia/ (https://www.facebook.com/fotolia/)
You can send a message (and comment).
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Fotolia phone number: 080 0917 0886
Did you try to phone them?
Fotolia page at Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/fotolia/ (https://www.facebook.com/fotolia/)
You can send a message (and comment).
Thank you so much for your reply!
I have tried to call them many times, I can't get them on phone [no response].
Sure I will send them a facebook message and I will update you guys as soon as I get a reply
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Any links to your portfolio on other sites? Maybe we can figure out why.
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It would be nice to get some Mat Hayward comments here since no response from support is no good. It's not about accepting hard drives or active previews in statistics, it's about quality of support.
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Any links to your portfolio on other sites? Maybe we can figure out why.
assuming FT has valid grounds for terminating the acct, that would possibly lead to terminating other accts
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Any links to your portfolio on other sites? Maybe we can figure out why.
Thank you for your post. last year I became an exclusive artist on Fotolia (AdobeStock) and I removed my files from the other sites.
Recently I've started uploading some emojis to my Fotolia account, you can find them at dribbble.com/annam
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It would be nice to get some Mat Hayward comments here since no response from support is no good. It's not about accepting hard drives or active previews in statistics, it's about quality of support.
I am freaked out! I can't believe Fotolia is doing this to me after working for them for more than a decade.
I've contacted Mat Hayward on 18th Oct.
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I would be fascinated to find out what happened. Hope it gets sorted out soon.
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Any links to your portfolio on other sites? Maybe we can figure out why.
assuming FT has valid grounds for terminating the acct, that would possibly lead to terminating other accts
Thank you for your post!
One thing I know for sure after being blocked from Fotolia, they make it as hard as possible for you to contact them. You can not even contact them at fotolia.com/Info/Contact I also don't have access to Fotolia Forum.
I also tired to call Fotolia's support International telephone line +1 888-674-2299, EU and EN +44 8009 170 886 but in my experience they either don’t pick up the phone at all, or they will just hang up on you by saying to contact the other zone.
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that is discouraging to hear
if someone has a legitimate claim, this can put a real damper on earnings
i think every stocksite should have an exclusive email or phone # where a member can get in touch easily to resolve these kind of problems, and only in these situations
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that is discouraging to hear
if someone has a legitimate claim, this can put a real damper on earnings
i think every stocksite should have an exclusive email or phone # where a member can get in touch easily to resolve these kind of problems, and only in these situations
Thank you for your post!
You can visit fotolia.com/Info/Support and you will find nothing there.
When I try to login into my account, I find a popup saying: ACCOUNT BLOCKED and I can not do anything there and as far as I know there is no way to contact them though fotolia.com
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Found these contacts in my Inbox:
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
Fotolia Twitter:
https://twitter.com/fotolia?lang=en (https://twitter.com/fotolia?lang=en)
Fotolia LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/company/fotolia (https://www.linkedin.com/company/fotolia)
Adobe Stock Twitter:
https://twitter.com/AdobeStock (https://twitter.com/AdobeStock)
Also I am sure your friend or spouse can open a Fotolia account and use his/her Inbox to contact Fotolia via their website and pay attention to your case.
Good luck!
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Found these contacts in my Inbox:
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
Fotolia Twitter:
https://twitter.com/fotolia?lang=en (https://twitter.com/fotolia?lang=en)
Fotolia LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/company/fotolia (https://www.linkedin.com/company/fotolia)
Adobe Stock Twitter:
https://twitter.com/AdobeStock (https://twitter.com/AdobeStock)
Also I am sure your friend or spouse can open a Fotolia account and use his/her Inbox to contact Fotolia via their website and pay attention to your case.
Good luck!
Dear PureArt Thank you for sharing these contact information.
I will try every possible way to contact Fotolia and I hope Adobe/Fotolia will resolve this issue as soon as they can. Thanks
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Keep us posted what you find out. I hope this gets resolved for you!
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This is very serious concern for all contributors working day and night to provide professional contents to these big enterprises. As what I see in your profile, it looks like you were working in vector and something got hanged due to copyright issues, just assumption not blaming anything on you at all.
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Any links to your portfolio on other sites? Maybe we can figure out why.
Thank you for your post. last year I became an exclusive artist on Fotolia (AdobeStock) and I removed my files from the other sites.
Recently I've started uploading some emojis to my Fotolia account, you can find them at dribbble.com/annam
So, is having the emojis at the Dribble site and uploading them to fotolia a violation of your exclusive artist agreement?
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@AnnaM, I'm sorry but I don't see any emails from anyone named Anna from the past several weeks. Please write to me directly via email address [email protected] and include your Fotolia login name so I can take a look at your account.
-Mat
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@AnnaM, I'm sorry but I don't see any emails from anyone named Anna from the past several weeks. Please write to me directly via email address [email protected] and include your Fotolia login name so I can take a look at your account.
-Mat
Dear MatHayward, Thank you for your post. I've just resent the email with requested details. I look forward to your response. Thanks
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This is very serious concern for all contributors working day and night to provide professional contents to these big enterprises. As what I see in your profile, it looks like you were working in vector and something got hanged due to copyright issues, just assumption not blaming anything on you at all.
I have started uploading these emojis last month, only 3 of them got rejected due Intellectual Property Violation, and few days later I found my account blocked without any warning and explanation.
I hope it's an error last night I sent a message to twitter.com/adobe I hope they will unblock my account soon. Thanks
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Good luck Anna! however there is something strange going on at Adobe. A friend of mine with nearly 5000 files turned Emerald just two weeks ago and suddenly it could go like twelve hours without a download and earnings were really down.
He wrote to the admin asking what was going on and the reply was basically like take it or leave it.
He has exactly the same mirrored portfolio at SS and the sales are coming in all the time approx ten times more then Adobe. Can it really be that much difference?
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He has exactly the same mirrored portfolio at SS and the sales are coming in all the time approx ten times more then Adobe. Can it really be that much difference?
Yes, it happens to me too, 7-8 x more.
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Thank you guys for help! Adobe/Fotolia resolved the issue, Fotolia moderation team blocked me due to the slack emojis I have submitted few weeks ago, and I have found out the problem was with e-mail system they had not received my e-mails sent on 18th Oct.
Thanks to @MatHayward for unblocking my Fotolia account.
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Thank you guys for help! Adobe/Fotolia resolved the issue, Fotolia moderation team blocked me due to the slack emojis I have submitted few weeks ago, and I have found out the problem was with e-mail system they had not received my e-mails sent on 18th Oct.
Thanks to @MatHayward for unblocking my Fotolia account.
What does that mean?
Anyway, I wish SS would be so trigger happy with spammers....
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Thank you guys for help! Adobe/Fotolia resolved the issue, Fotolia moderation team blocked me due to the slack emojis I have submitted few weeks ago, and I have found out the problem was with e-mail system they had not received my e-mails sent on 18th Oct.
Thanks to @MatHayward for unblocking my Fotolia account.
So the copyright was the real issue behind as I doubted earlier. Congrats for getting your port back, I can understand how hard it is to build one...
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He has exactly the same mirrored portfolio at SS and the sales are coming in all the time approx ten times more then Adobe. Can it really be that much difference?
Yes, it happens to me too, 7-8 x more.
In that case Adobe needs to do something about it! I turned Emerald myself a couple of years back and for me SS turns out at least 5-6 times more in dls and monies.
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He has exactly the same mirrored portfolio at SS and the sales are coming in all the time approx ten times more then Adobe. Can it really be that much difference?
Yes, it happens to me too, 7-8 x more.
In that case Adobe needs to do something about it! I turned Emerald myself a couple of years back and for me SS turns out at least 5-6 times more in dls and monies.
It is not SS that improved in the last few years in my case. It is about the same level all through. It is Fotolia that dropped to one third, or even one fourth, of what it used to be
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I thought it may have been the emojis. Those things are tricky, especially the yellow ones. They're all so similar that they're pretty much copies of each others designs and they can easily be mistaken for copyright infringement. I would avoid it, since this is something stock websites don't want to deal with.
Here is some interesting reading. Some smileys..which are basically emojis, are trademarked:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smiley
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He has exactly the same mirrored portfolio at SS and the sales are coming in all the time approx ten times more then Adobe. Can it really be that much difference?
Yes, it happens to me too, 7-8 x more.
In that case Adobe needs to do something about it! I turned Emerald myself a couple of years back and for me SS turns out at least 5-6 times more in dls and monies.
It is not SS that improved in the last few years in my case. It is about the same level all through. It is Fotolia that dropped to one third, or even one fourth, of what it used to be
Yes and exactly the same here. Adobe/Ft has dropped. I know several emeralds over there with the same story as ours. Wish I had stayed Gold since I earned twice as much.
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Good luck Anna! however there is something strange going on at Adobe. A friend of mine with nearly 5000 files turned Emerald just two weeks ago and suddenly it could go like twelve hours without a download and earnings were really down.
He wrote to the admin asking what was going on and the reply was basically like take it or leave it.
He has exactly the same mirrored portfolio at SS and the sales are coming in all the time approx ten times more then Adobe. Can it really be that much difference?
I didn't get anywhere near emerald but was doing well a few years ago when suddenly my sales collapsed. Years later I still sell very little with them compared to the other sites.
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I am emerald and have been doing okay until October. I always price up to the maximum I can, are you raising your prices?
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Yes I am but it somehow dont make much difference. Sales seem to come in sporadically like a few hours per day and then nothing. I have over 20K files there and specialized content.
I am not uploading anymore to Adobe but put all concentration and new material with SS who for some reason brings in about seven times more monies.
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Hi, I'm an Italian contributor since 4 years ago.
Several months ago my account was blocked. I called Fotolia and I was told that I sent too many files similar. The operator helped me at the phone and reopen my account and since then I've been careful not to send too many of them.
Recently, on Dec.26 my account has been blocked again. I have phoned again to the call center asking for help.
Apparently the problem is the same and I was told to write to the "support center" online. According to the operator, in response I should have received the names of the files to be deleted because similar.
I followed instructions, wrote on Dec. 27th but didn't receive any response.
I've called again on Dec.29th, spoke with the same operator, and he told me that on the following day he would have written to me an e.mail with the files to delete and reopen the account.
As of today I'm still blocked and didn't receive any e.mail.
I do not understand why my account has to be blocked while several others contributor present many similar files.
Being a contributor since 4 years with 9000 file online it is a bit annoying to go through this, and it is unfair to notice a despair of treatment among users.
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Why do they accept so many similars in the first place and why can't they remove them for you without blocking your account? Most of the big sites don't seem to think how stressful something like this can be to a contributor.
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Yes, you are right! I ask them why they accept the file and then blocked account....
Seems like they don't want some contributor...
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They answer me one hour ago
this is their answer
"come accennato al telefono, presentare immagini ritagliate dalla stessa inquadratura, secondo le nuove regolamentazioni, è considerato spam. Il tuo account è stato bloccato per la terza volta e la procedura prevede che resti bloccato diverse settimane, ci stiamo adoperando per limitare il tempo di blocco al minimo possibile."
"as mentioned on the phone, presenting cropped images from the same shot, according to the new regulations, it is considered spam. Your account has been blocked for the third time, and the procedure requires that the remains blocked several weeks, we are working to reduce the lock time to a minimum."
Sorry for my english...google translate do this for me.
So.... at phone they said "similar file", now "cropped file".
Then i ask why when i work some file with preset of Gimp or other software they accept some and refuse other for "file does not conform"...
Answer.....Yes you can work file but not so much.
Are they kidding me? I use only some preset and are all the same... How i can know how much for them?
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So you're uploading the same images more than once, and just cropping them differently? Does sound a bit spammy if that's the case.
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Maybe i cropped some image but i buy Canon S only in October and perhaps could be ten, more or less, because before that i used Canon 7D and is impossible crop the image otherwise they are too small....
Last year they blocked for similar image and now at the firs call they told me again similar. Today in the answer they mentioned "cropped".
https://www.shutterstock.com/g/spetenfia (https://www.shutterstock.com/g/spetenfia)
This is my portfolio on SS. Same for the Fotoliamore or less. I upload the same.
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...https://www.shutterstock.com/g/spetenfia (https://www.shutterstock.com/g/spetenfia)
This is my portfolio on SS. Same for the Fotoliamore or less. I upload the same.
I looked at the first part of your SS portfolio, newest first. Without knowing anything about the details of the similars policy at Fotolia, I would suggest that you could consider selecting fewer shots of each subject to upload as a way of getting a better portfolio (and it would possibly then avoid issues with the similars policy as well).
I was struck by long strings of similar images where I couldn't really see a good reason for so many of them (it's always clear to me that horizontal + vertical + closeup + wide view work in almost all cases; beyond that it gets murkier if the subject is the same). SS appears to have dropped the similars policy it used to have, so they won't mind either way, but I don't expect the many near identical images will actually help your sales (and I know that it's always hard to know which versions will sell best).
For what it's worth... :)
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I was just taking a look at your port and this is what i found
https://www.shutterstock.com/pic-543425050/stock-photo-lamb-with-shepherd.html?src=gU4IlWcgg9qcgS6SseJ56g-2-11 (https://www.shutterstock.com/pic-543425050/stock-photo-lamb-with-shepherd.html?src=gU4IlWcgg9qcgS6SseJ56g-2-11)
https://www.shutterstock.com/pic-546364690/stock-photo-lamb-with-shepherd.html?src=gU4IlWcgg9qcgS6SseJ56g-1-6 (https://www.shutterstock.com/pic-546364690/stock-photo-lamb-with-shepherd.html?src=gU4IlWcgg9qcgS6SseJ56g-1-6)
these 2 images are one and the same. the only difference is in contrast clarity etc....
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aaaand another one ;D
https://www.shutterstock.com/pic-544361962/stock-photo-duck-on-lake.html?src=gU4IlWcgg9qcgS6SseJ56g-1-66 (https://www.shutterstock.com/pic-544361962/stock-photo-duck-on-lake.html?src=gU4IlWcgg9qcgS6SseJ56g-1-66)
https://www.shutterstock.com/pic-544465246/stock-photo-duck-on-lake.html?src=gU4IlWcgg9qcgS6SseJ56g-1-56 (https://www.shutterstock.com/pic-544465246/stock-photo-duck-on-lake.html?src=gU4IlWcgg9qcgS6SseJ56g-1-56)
https://www.shutterstock.com/pic-453052423.html (https://www.shutterstock.com/pic-453052423.html)
I dont know what you gain from having the same picture with some slightly modified vignete...stick with one picture ( the one you think its best )
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You have 10,299 images on DT, and only 231 sales in 3 years.
You seriously need to rethink your strategy.
It's not a numbers game as much as it is quality and subject matter.
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And look at your keywording. The head of the lamb has these keywords:
animal wildlife, arms, christmas, farm, flock, grazing, hands, jesus, lamb, mammal, nativity, pasture, puppy, sheep, shepherd, stable, wild, wool
Not sure there is a flock, jesus, pasture, puppy, stable or wild displayed in the shot. Wool is a bit of a stretch and christmas?
Steve
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Lamb of God, I guess. (Jesus.)
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Some of the effects are a bit over the top and forced as well. I mean, using the liquify tool (or something similar) to make a non-heart-shaped stone, look like a heart-shaped stone? It's a good idea, but it now looks like one of those articles that list worst photoshop fails... where somebody has made themselves look thin, or their boobs look bigger, and all the furniture behind them is warped.
Some of your lens flares are blatant lens flare plugins as well... and that pixelated piece of art, not sure what's going on there. Some of your stuff is very good, but you just seem to be pushing the effects too much. You mentioned earlier about using presets in Gimp? Great, but you don't have to use every preset in the book. You'd be better focusing on colour correction and using tools to make each image look the best they can, rather than spending the time to get a decent shot and then altering it out of all recognition.
The sheep puppy doesn't look all that bad. I'd have stuck with one version and used about 25% to 35% of the effects you used on the jazzed up one... adds a bit of structure to his Christmas fur, and a bit of definition to Jesus' coat, but still looks pretty natural.
231 sales in 3 years on a portfolio of 10,000 means you're getting 0.00064 downloads per image, per month. So you'll have had an average of one download per image in 130 years time. What is the commission rate for an image on SS... is it 38 cents or something? So that one image you might have uploaded today, that's going to make you 38 cents after 130 years? You don't need to be a stock photography grand wizard to realise that's not exactly something to write home about.
Check your sales figures, see what your best selling items are. Are they natural images, or ones with fancy effects? If it's fancy effects then go for it... effect it up! But if they're more natural images then stick with that. What's the content of your best selling images as well? Are there certain elements and areas of content that you should be focussing on?
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Thanks to all for the suggestion.
I agree with everything.
Just some justification for what they're worth
1.Jesus keyword. DT suggest the keyword to be added when someone buy with this search. I added... (Christmas It was my thought because I photographed a living nativity scene)
2.the image that sell more (100/200 time for microstock) is lamb more prospects. Sometime someone buy 2/3 similar .
3. I have similar but not so much cropped like they said, maybe few units past two months
4. I looked other account and image similar are in most. they should close the mid account...( i agree I agree that it can be counterproductive). But don't understand why they accept similar and then blocked.. If they doesn't accept I do not think that the contributors continue to spend time to upload for years ..
Anyway I collect all your suggestions, it is my interest to learn.
Thank you all again.
Sorry for my English. :)