Ok, just thought I might share this little story: yesterday I got a small yet important Catalogue design job. The client wished at a specific place a Vector Image - nothing really special, a womans head with some symbols of a specific industry I may not disclose. Well, I thought that this would be a easy Job but found that I had to invest a little more time to find a suiting vector. I looked in 6 different places and learned that almost 90% of vectors of the desired style are just copies of one and each other. Note that the theme is not really something rare. In my desperation and urgent desire to shut the office down ( D: ) I decided to have a look at istock. THEY HAD ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. I found 55 pages of more or less relevant Vectors at DP, over 100 pages at DT, and six (6!) at istock. Furthermore the quality was average at best. Wow. I never thought istock would be such a loser but off course it makes me happy to see that they fail with _their_ policy.

One lesson learned yesterday:
1. upload limits are bad. Today you might be happy to safe some disk space. Tomorrow you cannot compete because you are missing content.
2. istock is dead.

Hey, thanks for sharing, I wish more buyers would post their experience here, good info for us and more importantly the agencies.

Buyers look for an easy interface with fast and relevant results without the need for using guides or trying to find those hidden features. 

Ok, just thought I might share this little story: yesterday I got a small yet important Catalogue design job. The client wished at a specific place a Vector Image - nothing really special, a womans head with some symbols of a specific industry I may not disclose. Well, I thought that this would be a easy Job but found that I had to invest a little more time to find a suiting vector. I looked in 6 different places and learned that almost 90% of vectors of the desired style are just copies of one and each other. Note that the theme is not really something rare. In my desperation and urgent desire to shut the office down ( D: ) I decided to have a look at istock. THEY HAD ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. I found 55 pages of more or less relevant Vectors at DP, over 100 pages at DT, and six (6!) at istock. Furthermore the quality was average at best. Wow. I never thought istock would be such a loser but off course it makes me happy to see that they fail with _their_ policy.

One lesson learned yesterday:
1. upload limits are bad. Today you might be happy to safe some disk space. Tomorrow you cannot compete because you are missing content.
2. istock is dead.

You can always shop at some of the smaller guys like Mystockvectors.com, Clipartof.com, or Toonvectors.com. They might have a different selection there.

Quote from: velocicarpo on September 14, 2012, 12:46

Ok, just thought I might share this little story: yesterday I got a small yet important Catalogue design job. The client wished at a specific place a Vector Image - nothing really special, a womans head with some symbols of a specific industry I may not disclose. Well, I thought that this would be a easy Job but found that I had to invest a little more time to find a suiting vector. I looked in 6 different places and learned that almost 90% of vectors of the desired style are just copies of one and each other. Note that the theme is not really something rare. In my desperation and urgent desire to shut the office down ( D: ) I decided to have a look at istock. THEY HAD ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. I found 55 pages of more or less relevant Vectors at DP, over 100 pages at DT, and six (6!) at istock. Furthermore the quality was average at best. Wow. I never thought istock would be such a loser but off course it makes me happy to see that they fail with _their_ policy.

One lesson learned yesterday:
1. upload limits are bad. Today you might be happy to safe some disk space. Tomorrow you cannot compete because you are missing content.
2. istock is dead.

You can always shop at some of the smaller guys like Mystockvectors.com, Clipartof.com, or Toonvectors.com. They might have a different selection there.

True. And finally I did yesterday.

Or you don't know how to search on Istock. Take a look at Shaun search guide for buyers. The fact that you have no other experience than this bad experience with searching Istock image tell me that you might need it.

You shouldn't need to 'know how to search on Istock'. It should be intuitive but it's not because of their ridiculous CV. You don't need someone to show you how to search Google or Amazon or any other non-Getty stock agency do you?

Btw, Shaun's name is actually Sean __ unless of course 'Sean' is not available in the CV.

Another thing what always comes to my mind when searching as a buyer is that I notice that there is PLENTY of room for new material and ideas. There are lots of niches which are not well covered, and this is actually good news.

Yep. I was once looking for some photos of bike lanes, roads etc. and it wasn't that easy to find what I needed. I would have thought those subjects are covered completely, but I guess not. I think I finally bought a couple of photos from DT.

So, If I found an image of Sean's and thought his name was Shaun ... would he sell it to me?   

You can always shop at some of the smaller guys like Mystockvectors.com, Clipartof.com, or Toonvectors.com. They might have a different selection there.

True. And finally I did yesterday.

I'm glad to see people are looking at the alternatives. I can't speak for others, but I know I have thousands more images (probably double my portfolio) on those three sites than I do elsewhere.

Ok, just thought I might share this little story: yesterday I got a small yet important Catalogue design job. The client wished at a specific place a Vector Image - nothing really special, a womans head with some symbols of a specific industry I may not disclose. Well, I thought that this would be a easy Job but found that I had to invest a little more time to find a suiting vector. I looked in 6 different places and learned that almost 90% of vectors of the desired style are just copies of one and each other. Note that the theme is not really something rare. In my desperation and urgent desire to shut the office down ( D: ) I decided to have a look at istock. THEY HAD ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. I found 55 pages of more or less relevant Vectors at DP, over 100 pages at DT, and six (6!) at istock. Furthermore the quality was average at best. Wow. I never thought istock would be such a loser but off course it makes me happy to see that they fail with _their_ policy.

One lesson learned yesterday:
1. upload limits are bad. Today you might be happy to safe some disk space. Tomorrow you cannot compete because you are missing content.
2. istock is dead.

Oddly enough, as a buyer, I have the opposite experience: finding at IS what I often can't find at other sites.

Quote from: Vonkara on September 14, 2012, 12:53

Or you don't know how to search on Istock. Take a look at Sean search guide for buyers...

Why is it acceptable that third-party resources and tools are needed to get people up to speed or make istock work better? I applaud Sean and anyone else who tries to help buyers and contributors with resources, plugins, tools, etc.. But I'm baffled as to why it is acceptable to put the onus on people outside of istock HQ to fix the site's problems or educate people on how to use it's complex features.

We could at least point the blame where it's deserved. The search guide is helpful, sure. But it shouldn't even be necessary.

My thoughts exactly. I felt the same about istock telling contributors they needed to download third-party software just to upload their images to istock. 

Quote from: velocicarpo on September 14, 2012, 12:46

I looked in 6 different places and learned that almost 90% of vectors of the desired style are just copies of one and each other. Note that the theme is not really something rare. In my desperation and urgent desire to shut the office down ( D: ) I decided to have a look at istock. THEY HAD ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. I found 55 pages of more or less relevant Vectors at DP, over 100 pages at DT, and six (6!) at istock.

So you have two different complaints here:
At six non-iStock agencies, everyone is just ripping off everyone else,so you don't get much variety. You found 55 pages of 'more or less relevant images' at DP and 100 pages at DT, yet in all that you found nothing that would suit your project.
You then 'in desperation' went to iStock and found either 'absolutely nothing' on your theme, or 'six' images that didn't suit your project.

So none of the places you looked at had anything that suited your project, but you choose to malign iStock because they saved you wading through 55 or 100 pages not to find what you needed.

That makes no sense whatsoever. You didn't find what you wanted. You have found a niche. Lose-WIN. But I see no reason to particularly single out iStock for criticism. If they'd had 75 pages of stuff you didn't like, would that have been OK?

I am very sorry that my story does not make sense to you. Sadly it is the truth. And it is not too rare to have such a experience if a client wants a very specific style.

BTW: Istock did not save me anything. They had the same mixed results as any other page, just lots less of it. Furthermore I prefer more blurry search results and do I care looking through 10 more pages. Its called "having choice" and usually I like it.

ShadySue does have a point although I don't see how that point implies a criticism of the OP.    It is true that if - for a given search - agency 'A' simply presents more pages of cr@p than agency 'B', it's not really a reason to prefer 'A'.  I think the OP was expressing disappointment that none of these agencies, despite their tens of millions of images, had what he wanted - and that he expected IS to do much better than it did.

And as the OP won't share with us the actual search, we can't find out whether it is a deficiency of iStock's search system or an actual lack of images.

Quote from: ShadySue on September 14, 2012, 18:17

Quote from: stockastic on September 14, 2012, 18:16

ShadySue does have a point although I don't see how that point implies a criticism of the OP.    It is true that if - for a given search - agency 'A' simply presents more pages of cr@p than agency 'B', it's not really a reason to prefer 'A'.  I think the OP was expressing disappointment that none of these agencies, despite their tens of millions of images, had what he wanted - and that he expected IS to do much better than it did.

And as the OP won't share with us the actual search, we can't find out whether it is a deficiency of iStock's search system or an actual lack of images.

Ok, I sense a money-making opportunity here, for those who have mastered IS's constantly-changing search functions.    Buyers need professional help to find the needles in that haystack.

Or they could crowdsource via the request new contest thread.
If you were going to pay someone to find stuff, they might as well go to a macro and get their picture researchers to do it.
OTOH, my sales haven't recovered this month, so PICK ME as your searcher!