Hello,

a user on zymmetrical has stolen two of my images, please check his profile if he stole some of your images too.
http://www.zymmetrical.com/artists/artist-profile/uid/53184/
I am not sure but i think he downloaded them from flickr and upsized them. I don´t think he bought them to upload them for himself, but who knows...

theese are the images:
http://www.zymmetrical.com/art/photos/photos-nature-animals/fileid/zyimgnaa25698/
http://www.zymmetrical.com/art/photos/photos-nature-animals/fileid/zyimgnaa17855/

I emailed zymmetrical about this.

What else can i do, can somebody help me, please?

IT has happened before that pictures from different contributors get mixed up at Zymmetrical. I found two images that were not mine in my portfolio and they even had keywords of my images.
Zymmetrical has a very good customer service, I'm sure they will help you with this.

Quote from: lexius on March 05, 2009, 23:24
What else can i do, can somebody help me, please?

Since he has 125,000 images in his port, I guess it's a glitch in the database. It happened before: I had shots of somebody else in my port. It was solved. You will get a reply and an explanation soon. Zym is very responsive.

Quote from: FlemishDreams on March 06, 2009, 00:01

Quote from: lexius on March 05, 2009, 23:24
What else can i do, can somebody help me, please?

Since he has 125,000 images in his port, I guess it's a glitch in the database. It happened before: I had shots of somebody else in my port. It was solved. You will get a reply and an explanation soon. Zym is very responsive.

Either that or he/she is an extremely talented photographer able to master a tremendous variety of styles.

All I can say is,
this guy has so many totally different images and so many different models...

just to let you know, we are aware of the issue and keith is on it ( he has been really sick the last few days). Update very soon.

Best

Quote from: ZymmMan on March 06, 2009, 01:15he has been really sick the last few days

Wish him the best.

Quote from: ZymmMan on March 06, 2009, 01:15
just to let you know, we are aware of the issue and keith is on it ( he has been really sick the last few days). Update very soon.

Best

If he has the awful flu currently spreading throughout Vancouver then I totally feel for him. It's brutal.    Hope he feels better soon!

My guess is Yuri wouldn't be so happy finding his images in lynx's portfolio... 

http://www.zymmetrical.com/art/photos/photos-people/fileid/zyimgppp28366/

Patrick H.

125,000 images he could start his own stocksite.
I'm sure it must be a glitch, nobody could load that many photos, how many does yuri have  with his team to do the work.

Guys we are a distribution partner with Panthermedia.net.  That's all - if you find your images under the Lynx name it means you're getting paid through them. 

On MSG there seems to be at least one thread a week 'my images on some site I did not sign up with' regarding different agencies: if you sign up to Panthermedia, Fotolia, etc. where you have opted-in to various Partnership/Distribution agreements, please -check with that agency first- as to what the scoop is.

Stolen images on Zymmetrical would be very difficult to get by since our Reviewers know and see all, never mind the technical steps we take.

Ahh, thats why my penguins are on your site.  So what happens if I choose to  upload to your site as well, will you delete my image from panthermedia?

We would go per artist request - your choice, however re-uploading, re-reviewing, re-processing is a time consuming thing.. if you're happy with Panther you may be better off sticking with them and let us do our distribution thing.

Note - we will be adding their new web size price format as an option soon which will add some more movement on the lower price brackets.

Quote from: zymmetrical on March 06, 2009, 08:20
Guys we are a distribution partner with Panthermedia.net.  That's all - if you find your images under the Lynx name it means you're getting paid through them. 

On MSG there seems to be at least one thread a week 'my images on some site I did not sign up with' regarding different agencies: if you sign up to Panthermedia, Fotolia, etc. where you have opted-in to various Partnership/Distribution agreements, please -check with that agency first- as to what the scoop is.

Stolen images on Zymmetrical would be very difficult to get by since our Reviewers know and see all, never mind the technical steps we take.

At least now i understand, thanks for the quick response and sorry for another one of thees "images stolen" threads.

Maybe you can find a way to inform the photograhpers about that. Image theft is a big issue in theese days and every photographer who will find his own images in an agency under a different username will be upset and think his images are stolen.

Now that i now this, it is no problem for me.

By the way i like Zymmetrical very much, it is one of the most interesting agencies. I will keep on uploading and hope that sales will come up one day.

One question that still remains for me is, what happens if i upload images to zymmetrical that are distributed over partners?

Thank you!

Thanks   You are right perhaps it could be integrated for more clarity- but opting in to distribution channels means gaining more revenue with perhaps less oversight. As long as you have faith in the agencies involved (Panther is a fantastic agency) there should be no worries.   

It's a good question about directly uploading, if you are already opted in to Panther distribution- of course we'd love anyone to work with us directly too, and you'd like to upload some to us, just send our support a note and we will confirm your identity and get you a list of any existing photos so there's no duplication.

Quote from: zymmetrical on March 06, 2009, 09:25It's a good question about directly uploading, if you are already opted in to Panther distribution- of course we'd love anyone to work with us directly too, and you'd like to upload some to us, just send our support a note and we will confirm your identity and get you a list of any existing photos so there's no duplication.

Does it work the other way round too? That is, Panther distributes Zym's images? I heard here that Panther's upload process is very tedious so I never bothered. Panther might distribute Zym's images of those contributors that aren't on Panther...

No, no API on our side yet.   Just some XML to code but most importantly a major business project - maybe in time.

The thing that really, really troubles me about these partnerships (It's not just this PM one, it's also JI subs for example) is the fact the copyright holder is not given any form of credit.  It's just not right.  Jan Will's penguins will appear in a magazine with a credit line something like "Photo by Lynx" or "(c) Zymmetrical".   Agencies are our distributors, not the owners of the content.

Quote from: Pixart on March 06, 2009, 16:54
The thing that really, really troubles me about these partnerships (It's not just this PM one, it's also JI subs for example) is the fact the copyright holder is not given any form of credit.  It's just not right.  Jan Will's penguins will appear in a magazine with a credit line something like "Photo by Lynx" or "(c) Zymmetrical".   Agencies are our distributors, not the owners of the content.

Unfortunately that happens even without partnership - quite often photos are credited "istockphoto" or "fotolia" or whatever agency and not the photographer. That's part of microstock licensing scheme - the publishers don't have to provide the credit to photographer...

Yes, it is unfortunate.  But "I don't have to" and "I would love to credit the photographer but I have no idea who they are" are two different things.

Let me see if I understand it.  If I had images in Panther (I don't) and they were being sold in Zymm, my name would not appear in Zymm as the author, but "Lynx" instead?   

And for what I understand, we are talking about agencies, not artists.  Here, Lynx is identified as an artist, who did all the photos in his portfolio.

Obviously that is not the case.  So why don't you identify clearly Lynx as a re-distributor or anything else but NOT as the photographer who did the photos?

Claude

Edited to add: Photos from Lynx's portfolio (at least the ones that I checked) are copyrighted by Lynx.  That is not the case , am I right?

How does something like this one come up for "elephant" ?

Quote
High-resolution Royalty-free .JPG stock photo
Emotional White III
Copyright ©: Lynx

   working elephant |  Asian |  dichhaeuter |  dichhäuter |  thick skin |  elefranteus |  plodder |  tourist swing |  animal | 

This might be why IS will take over the world of stock. CV



Photos 26, 46, 48, in search for Green Apple. Not to ignore all the rest that are red apples with a green leaf or something else green. Vague keywords, stretches of what's really the subject of a photo and outright keyword spam isn't dead, it's just killing stock photography.

For a laugh try "race car", where two of the first 15 images are photos of cats, four have no car in them. Three are women smiling, one with a dog. People sitting at a table...

Before you think I've gone mad, set the number if images to 160 per page, because Page one comes up last in the ZYM search. If someone searches for only 20 images, the best match comes up. As you search for more images, the lower matching photos, show on the top of the page, which is a little bit crazy?

A little bit crazy? Try automobile looking at the top 40 matches.



I wish you the best Zymmetrical (with two M's, don't anyone try the site with one M where you can find a poop frame) but you need to sort out your search engine.

@Lorraine- I am in full agreement about the artist credit however in this case it's a tradeoff of exposure and new marketing channels vs some anonymity. The artist credit is given on the downloads page after purchase. Since we are not legally able to create an 'account' on behalf of each photographer in the distributorship (someone has to sign up and agree personally to have an account), the artist name is a piece of the metadata. As far as our agreements go we are simply abiding by the terms of their opt-in distribution channel.     

@Maria - That is correct, with the caveat noted in the first point. Note we do not distribute images from existing Zymm members to avoid overlaps, so you can upload to Panthermedia and even opt-in to their distibution program and it won't conflict with your existing account with us.

@Racephoto - We are adding a couple new languages and rebuilding the search indexes over the weekend, you may have experienced the strange results on account of that.

Quote from: zymmetrical on March 07, 2009, 14:35@Racephoto - We are adding a couple new languages and rebuilding the search indexes over the weekend, you may have experienced the strange results on account of that.

A - No search engine will help if there is a keyword-spammer in the house. Some are very notorious at it. Will there be an option soon to flag an image for bad keywords?

B - I found this and this and this and this (position #11!) under "medical, doctor", and that was only the first page. Also a lot of isolated stethoscopes with no persons. The first real doctors only show up later in the page. Sorry, but "doctor" is a person.

This one is on position #2 for "doctor,medical", an underexposed snapshot of a disposable syringe. Pardon me, but if I were a customer looking for "doctors" (person) I would be turned off by the abundance of irrelevant images on the first page.

As a comparison, I did a quick check on DT for the same search terms and the first 7 pages came up with real doctors.  Istock was (as usual) slightly worse with just 3 irrelevant images in the top 60, and SS had 4 in the first 60.

C - By coincidence, I just checked a few on top but they are all from Lynx. Also the "spam" examples are from Lynx. So Zymm seems to privilege Panther's contributors, rather than its own. Don't forget the secret to sales is position as result of the search engine, not image quality. The obvious conclusion would be not to upload to Zymm but to Panther, since you'll get (a) a better position in the search engine and (b) you can sell at both sites with the same upload effort. 
(Incidentally, the same argument for uploading to Fotolia only and not to Pixmac).