Personally I don't understand why you would want to.

Depending on the size you're giving a buyer 9 medium to large pictures for.25 to .30.

It's already cheap enough. Do you really want to contribute to a trend that gives you .03 per photo?

That's a good point PaulieWalnuts I agree. However those who do collages (that are accepted) seems to do great. On the other hand I do not know how much does the quantity of singe images sold reduces if uploading collages  

edit: or they are not doing so well according to cascoly 

Hello,

Usually when looking at images that sell good I find that photo collages sell rather well (at least at shutterstock when arranging by popularity collages are among the top images). I tried to make some of them and upload them to the Shutterstock (did not try others yet). Every single collage was rejected due to "Composition--Limited commercial value due to framing, cropping, and/or composition".
Here are two of those collages (btw. each separate image included in collage has already been accepted):

How could they be improved?

What are your experience with collages? Have you been rejected when sending them? Excluding Shutterstock what are your experience on other agencies?

Thanks for the answer,
regards
miskolin

I do see value in collages. The images the collage is composed of is usually smaller resolution than the original one. At least that's how I would do it. So it's not really devaluing your images. The advantage is that the buyer would have a nice looking composition of images shot in similar style and united by the same theme. Style and theme are very important for collage.

Miskolin - your second collage seems to be a collection of fairly random images. Soup, coffee, water, cupcakes? What is this collage trying to convey? In that respect I understand "composition" rejection. The first collage at least sticks with fruits and vegetables, but again, pretty random ones. I would do fruits separately and vegetables separately at least. Even better would be thinking of a more concrete theme - like Mediterranean cuisine for example.

Cascoly - the collage you posted looks a bit messy. The theme is obvious, but I have to make an effort even to look at it. The composition could be much more "clean".

Making a nice "working" collage is a skill on it's own - you have to think about the concept and matching colors and shapes, and so on. Most people just slap a bunch of images together and call it a collage. Maybe that's why some agencies don't want to accept them.

louoates, it is nice to hear that collages do not detract much.

I agree with your point Elenathewise; my collages should be more specific. At least the second one is most probably to wide (i guess food and drink simply is to broad category) - so it could be that with the composition rejection reviewer wanted to say: "thanks but that really looks just to messy" (however the first one is more focused). Thanks for your critical advice, I appreciate it.

What about images you include in the collages... do you crop them to i.e. square as I did, or do you just resize them and combine different vertical and horizontal images to the collage?

Hello,

Usually when looking at images that sell good I find that photo collages sell rather well (at least at shutterstock when arranging by popularity collages are among the top images). I tried to make some of them and upload them to the Shutterstock (did not try others yet). Every single collage was rejected due to "Composition--Limited commercial value due to framing, cropping, and/or composition".
Here are two of those collages (btw. each separate image included in collage has already been accepted)

I have some food collage on SS - some quite similar to your first one - and they are selling well indeed. But they were accepted a long time ago: I tried again recently and all were rejected for Limited commercial value on SS.

I also tried on IS and they told me to submit images individually. Problem is single images of food are not selling nearly as much.

Quote from: miskolin on May 26, 2010, 12:48

Hello,

Usually when looking at images that sell good I find that photo collages sell rather well (at least at shutterstock when arranging by popularity collages are among the top images). I tried to make some of them and upload them to the Shutterstock (did not try others yet). Every single collage was rejected due to "Composition--Limited commercial value due to framing, cropping, and/or composition".
Here are two of those collages (btw. each separate image included in collage has already been accepted):

How could they be improved?

What are your experience with collages? Have you been rejected when sending them? Excluding Shutterstock what are your experience on other agencies?

Thanks for the answer,
regards
miskolin

I do see value in collages. The images the collage is composed of is usually smaller resolution than the original one. At least that's how I would do it. So it's not really devaluing your images. The advantage is that the buyer would have a nice looking composition of images shot in similar style and united by the same theme. Style and theme are very important for collage.

Miskolin - your second collage seems to be a collection of fairly random images. Soup, coffee, water, cupcakes? What is this collage trying to convey? In that respect I understand "composition" rejection. The first collage at least sticks with fruits and vegetables, but again, pretty random ones. I would do fruits separately and vegetables separately at least. Even better would be thinking of a more concrete theme - like Mediterranean cuisine for example.

Cascoly - the collage you posted looks a bit messy. The theme is obvious, but I have to make an effort even to look at it. The composition could be much more "clean".

Making a nice "working" collage is a skill on it's own - you have to think about the concept and matching colors and shapes, and so on. Most people just slap a bunch of images together and call it a collage. Maybe that's why some agencies don't want to accept them.

Of course there's value for the buyer. They're getting 9 images at no extra cost. I'd question the value for the contributor. Are they getting 9x the sales volume? Even if so, the individual images are devalued.

On top of that SS is losing money. The buyer is getting 9 images and that only counts as 1 download toward the buyers quota. And for other sites that buyer was probably going to buy 9 images but now only bought 1. Yikes.

If a collage is done correctly I understand there's other value for the buyer. It's a prepackaged collection of similar images that offers the covenience of not having to look for individual images.

And yes it should be made from smaller images but I just checked a handful at SS. They were 9 image collages ranging from 6500 x 6500 to 7500 x 7500. That means each image is 4-5 megapixels which is about the largest size that most buyers buy. So they're getting 9 large images for the same cost as one. And the contributor still gets 30 cents. 

There has got to be a better way of offering this convenience without the contributor and agency coming up short. If a buyer is getting 9 images they should be paying for 9 images.

Something would need to be implemented by the agencies.

Maybe a collage feature that you can add images to and it automatically creates them. The cost would be the normal image cost multiplied by the quantity of images in it. Buyers gets convenience and contributor/agency get normal royalty.

Or maybe a special price just for collages that is set based upon the number of images in it.

Quote

There has got to be a better way of offering this convenience without the contributor and agency coming up short. If a buyer is getting 9 images they should be paying for 9 images.

Or maybe 9 images for the price of 8 or something discounted like that, but I agree, both the contributor and the agency get shafted on these collages. I can understand why they are rejecting them and hopefully will continue to do so.

Here we go again, finding a way to race to the bottom.

Good point. A little incentive would make sense.

I get what you're saying but your collage is different from most at SS. Yours probably isn't selling like hotcakes becuase buyers can't easily extract all of the images from it. Which drives home my point. Buyers probably aren't using the collage. They're using the images from the collage to save money.

Type in collage at SS. There's one with 225 images. It's 56 megapixels. Divide that by 225 and you get 225 250K images that are perfect for web usage. 225 images and the contributor gets .30 cents.

And photographers wonder why buyers expect us to jump through flaming hoops for a few pennies.

ETA: I just checked Istock's sizes and a 250KB image would be a Small size. So depending on the type of contributor and pricing you would be getting 60 cents to a few dollars per image sale. So 225 images multiplied by a minimum of 60 cents is $135. The collage is 30 cents.

Type in collage at SS. There's one with 225 images. It's 56 megapixels. Divide that by 225 and you get 225 250K images that are perfect for web usage. 225 images and the contributor gets .30 cents.

If the images don't stand up on their own you may have to package them so that someone will think they're getting good value. The difference in size of that contributors portfolio on SS and IS is quite interesting - it also doesn't seem to be particularly popular on sites that aren't as enthusiastic about the packaged photo arrangements. 

For SS less downloads in a subscription package means more money for them - its better for them if someone downloads a collage of 225 images than the images individually. Maybe that's one of the reasons why there are about 10x results when you do this search on SS compared to IS - and the content is very different.

While you can do collages in a way that creates a product for the buyer - cropping images square and aligning them in another square isn't really the way forward.