More than two months after Fotolia's re-engineering, my keywords are still useless and most of my images have been invisible to any search. Consequently, my sales have halted. It seems that Fotolia has now captured the market and will discharge us with no explanation.

I have read that the problem is happening to many others and wouldn't have been a big deal if some of us hadn't uploaded so many photos, hundreds of photos, some over thousands.  Fotolia seems to have blocked many photographers  without any explanation, while there are still some, whose keywords were not messed (I checked) that haven't had the same problems as we did.

I believe that if the site belongs to the founders, which are a  group of photographers, they can do as they please, on the other hand, we helped Fotolia to grow, we invested our time uploading photos and we need to know what Fotolia is up to. Are they going to dismiss the ones outside their group? If so, fine, but they should be honest and tell us that instead of blocking our work and wasting our time.

We should, all together, demand a final word from Fotolia

FT is on track for a record month in September - which is very welcome after all the turmoil following V2's introduction.

For a long time after V2, searches for images of mine - common keywords - produced pitiful results, but things certainly are returning much better results now.

I have no knowledge of FT doing anything special for me - or "blocking" any group of photographers. Where did you get the idea of some people being "outside their group"? My images are selling and I'm not connected with management or the founders in any way.

Have you contacted support with some specific examples of images that don't show up and asked them to look into it? It seems that's the thing to do if you want outstanding problems fixed...

Has this improved my sales at FT?  NO. 

But you can make categories in My Files, a folder to place your group of similar theme photos into.  That way, if a buyer happens to find just one of your photos, there is a chance they will click through to see the rest in the series.

Ahhhhhh.... really?  So this is why it has not improved my sales! 

When I looked at my similars on a few I thought it was working.

just received the following answer from FT:

We apologize for the inconvenience. Our search engine currently displays as a "search result" only the first 7 keywords associated to the image. Try searching your image by entering the first 7 keywords you entered that are associated with that image.

My answer now is why must we then add more than 7 keywords?
The microstock market is growing up day by day.
A few companies hanen't understood it yet.

No - the seven keyword thing also applied under V1.

The fact of the matter is that, at FT, if you do not order your keywords correctly (when uploading the image) you are wasting your time.

This is why I've always commented on the considerable amount of time it takes me to upload to FT - sorting the keywords using their rather slow sort list thing is very time consuming.

But my sales there are very good, so investing the time is worth it.

I don't think they will expand beyond the seven word thing for some considerable time (if ever).

It is probably because there is so much keyword spam and if we are restricted to 7, the search should be more accurate.

Putting the keywords in order of importance is a sensible thing to do. Most sites (except FT) rank them alphabetically. If sites in the future would strip the first 7 (FT), 15 (CanStockPhoto), 20, 50 keywords, you can still manage with one single IPTC set in your photos. Made a script for that, but free to use for everybody (use it together with Irfanview):

Tag Sorter (and much more).

I agree with Wander... we need to put some pressure on Fotolia.  Ever since the V2 introduction a full 90% of my images cannot be found on their site.  With respect to the first seven keywords solution this is a load of crap... I sampled at least 30 of my images with the first few keywords and none of them could be found.  Prior to V2 I never had any problems.

Since June 19, 2007 I have brought this to the attention of their technical services group no less than seven times and they just keep blowing me off.  So as a final act of desperation I emailed Fotolia's President (Oleg Tscheltzoff) on 10/1... and as you may surmise I haven't gotten a response from him either.  His email address is newbielink:mailto:[email protected] [nonactive] so if any of you want to reinforce the need to resolve this issue give it a shot.  Remember there is power in numbers.

I tried to propose a reasonable argument to plead our case... like this issue is not only costing their photographers sales, but on a larger scale it is costing Fotolia a lot of lost revenue.  But this line of reasoning fell on deaf ears.  I can't help but believe that the keyword search issue is only the tip of the iceberg.

If I ever hear back from Mr. Tscheltzoff I will let the group know!

I too have been having issues with many of my images not showing up in searches.  And yes, I'm searching on keywords that are listed as the first 7.  After complaining to them twice over a two month period and getting the usual "we're working on it" I have given up.  They obviously aren't interested in those lost revenues.  What a joke.

General question to this thread and group... have any of you pulled your images from Fotolia based on the keyword search problems as well as other issues?

I am seriously considering yanking all my images out of frustration.  The only negative is the amount of time it took me to correct the images, keyword them, and then upload them.  I've only got 251 images on the site... but it still took a while to upload them.

If I thought it would prompt them to resolve some of the issues I would yank my images today.  Unfortunately they have over 300,000 contributors so unfortunately one person wouldn't prompt them to take any action.  Let me know your thoughts... thanks!

Good point... still bad odds though!

I reordered my keywords about 4 months ago and sales came to a grinding halt.  Hard to say what I can blame it on, the reordering or V2.

I'm very optimistic looking forward though, I'm crossing my fingers that something has been fixed because the number of sales I had from Tues-Friday equals half of what I had in total last month.    Has anyone else noticed this trend, or is it just a fluke?