Today I took 167 shots up in the studio.
Of a hunter in a camouflage suit.
You know, You look through the pictures and process the most striking of them.
Like pointing left or pointing right. You choose the most dynamic and put them into photoshop and pop them up.
Keyword them, it takes 10 minutes via dusegard.
Then mass upload some to one agency, others to other agencies where you think they can earn a little bit.
Then comes iStock and you press a button.

And you are stuck!
It takes so long time to click yourself through a single picture.
You do it, and it comes to category choices and you have to click many times and try to figure out where your image fits. Is it  nature or isolation or people in love.
Every stupid choice annoys you and feels meaningless.
Then the endless clicking to make keywords pass through. And My Good! the definitions of those keywords. Have they bought their dictionary in a flea market in Kansas? Its so far out. And again lots of choises of half meaningless things, is it a cow or a guitar brand you have never heard of?
You manage to get through with one of your pictures, the other prepared ones, you dont bother to upload. Its is not that it takes time, though thats bad enough, its is more the many impossible choices, because the categories are unnatural and the disambiguation is based on such a primitive data set.. We can always do that if it sells, you think. Then you stop and get a relief since you are not at work and have to do it and the is no boss who looks.
My guess is that iStock thinks they are mighty smart and only get the best of the best pictures that way.
Maybe so.

But they also gets a lot of annoy factor.

So that persons like me builds up such a deep and longgoing frustration that they cannot keep their mouth shot (as you see).

But there are many things iStock doesnt get:
Like variations of pictures in series.
Like the different picture with different keywords.
Like a lot of appropriate keywords its easier to wing out than to qualify.
There is more but I will spare you.
I wont even mention the word rejection.

Point is, There is so much iStock doesnt get.
and take a look, its visible in the searches.

phew rant over. Im sorry. I have now finished my uploading and spread my load of pictures to 4-5 sites. Istock got one.

True. istock makes themselves look life a old-school dinosaur left behind in evolution with this process. Same goes to veer. MS is a mass market. The most successful material comes from volume producers which know what they do. Disambiguation has shown to be useless as well as upload limits nowadays hurt the agency more than the contrib...lots of agency competition, haven`t noticed that istock?

Make it easy to upload unlimited, reject the trash and get what you need to compete or be left behind.

Every now and then I think that I should just get over it, and get to work submitting all my photos to IS.  And then I think of that 'disambiguation' interface, and the categories, and the rejections, and Photo+, TS and all the rest.   And I go out and rake leaves instead.

I feel your pain.  It takes me less time to submit a batch of 30 pictures (give or take) to 13 sites than it takes to submit them to Istock.  That's why everybody else gets them first and Istock only when I have some extra time to get around to it.

I'm bummed I have to put some effort into it soon though, because if I wait much longer the Christmas stuff will be irrelevant. 

Yes, I sit here and upload too - week after week with iStock gobbling up major chunks of my upload time.  Saw yr website Lisafx and congrats, great site!  Wish it were open to other contributors, the likes of me, always looking for new and better outlets with painless uploads and more than pennies on the sale...

http://sdeva.com/

Yes, I sit here and upload too - week after week with iStock gobbling up major chunks of my upload time.  Saw yr website Lisafx and congrats, great site!  Wish it were open to other contributors, the likes of me, always looking for new and better outlets with painless uploads and more than pennies on the sale...

http://sdeva.com/

thanks for the compliment!  It's just a Ktools site, though, nothing fancy.  And I am making hardly anything with it, so no point in taking on other contributors. 

There are more enterprising folks taking on contributors though.  You might look at the Picturengine threads, for example.