I am not sure what happened, but when I launch SS now, I get unceasing login pop up windows for Adobe Stock.  No matter how many times I fill in the correct user name and password, it just comes back.  Please fix this.

Make sure you complete it, see your authenticated dashboard and it closes automatically.
Do NOT close it manually as it will be considered a non-successful authentication attempt.

I have completed it a hundred times.  I said that already.  Why did you not read what I wrote?

I did. It's a common mistake to not complete the process correctly.
Before replying, I've tried to reproduce the issue but couldn't - authentication is being kept after authenticating once for me.
Could you record a video of the process and PM me?

similar problem here with 'Canstock' !!   

even completed your popud asking for a number, but still it comes back !! 
also asked Canstock for an explanation, but nothing received !?

2 weeks ago it was 'Adobe', what is going wrong with SS Niakris ??

Canstock has a very short session life time now unfortunately.
Even if you log in in a normal browser it'll log you out automatically after an hour or two.
Hence the program has to ask you to pass the captcha as well.

Quote from: thenatureguy on April 03, 2020, 12:16

I have completed it a hundred times.  I said that already.  Why did you not read what I wrote?

I did. It's a common mistake to not complete the process correctly.
Before replying, I've tried to reproduce the issue but couldn't - authentication is being kept after authenticating once for me.
Could you record a video of the process and PM me?

Authentication is not beings saved for me.  I have to enter my username and password each time.  But, in truth, I am logged in to Adobe Stock and upload and submit even while the login screen keeps popping back up over and over again.  But I just noticed another problem.  I can't upload to Shutterstock.  It shows to be logged in, but when I try to upload, it shows to be uploading, but when finished, the file is not registered as having been uploaded and is listed at "Ready to upload".   I guess the whole program is messing up.  Send me a link to the latest version and I will try reinstalling to see if this fixes the problem.

@thenatureguy

1. AdobeStock - as I said, please record a video of logging with StockSubmitter into it and I'll try to reproduce it because for me it works fine...
Shutterstock - Please check the "Errors" button after attempting to upload there, there should be a reason why doesn't it get uploaded.

Website - it must be a mistake or a false positive. Could you show me what's in their "Full Report"?

You can use this link to see the report on your site: https://safeweb.norton.com/report/show?url=https://stocksubmitter.com/&ulang=en

When uploading to Shutterstock I get a connection time out error.  I don;t get this error when uploading to adobestock, dreamstime, or 123RF.  The error only occurs with SS.

This is a new problem.  I have changed nothing on my system form the last time I uploaded.  I never had a problem uploading to Shutterstock before, so I doubt that my antivirus is the problem here because the error does not occur while uploading to any other site. 

I am going to be honest here.  Please try to listen and not get offended.

It just seems from where I am setting that the Stocksubmitter program is lagging behind when it comes to internet security.  When I first started using it, I never had to reenter user names and passwords each time I launched the program.  Then Alamy started requiring me to re-login each time and pass a CAPTCHA images test (which is really irritating).  Then Shutterstock started doing the same thing.  Now Adobestock is doing it but even when properly completed, Adobestock is rejecting the authentication. It is a massive pain in the butt! 

Now, I can log into all of these websites from a browser with no problem, never having to reenter my login info or pass a CAPTCHA test, because these sites TRUST the browser security and recognize me as the same user.

So, the question is, why are these sites not trusting a connect from Stocksubmitter and treating each contact as a new login, instead of recognizing that it is the same user from last time?

Now, don't get me wrong. I appreciate your program and it is extremely helpful, but I find it concerning that at every turn, you are being flagged by every security system on the internet.  Your website gets flagged, and your program cannot be installed without having to bypass Windows Security.  I have dealt with utterly thousands of apps and programs and yours is the ONLY one that I have ever had to do that. I would be remiss if I did not question why you are having such a hard time with the standard security protocols everyone else seems to have no issues with.  And it does not seem to bother you, which bothers me and begs me to question more.

Again, I appreciate you and your program, but I would like to see you spend a little effort on compliance with security.  Your site is flagged, Windows flags your program, and Stocks sites increasingly do not trust connection from your program, requiring users to go through extensive security checks every time your program tries to connect to them.  It is time to start fixing these security issues, ASAP!

This is a new problem.  I have changed nothing on my system form the last time I uploaded.  I never had a problem uploading to Shutterstock before, so I doubt that my antivirus is the problem here because the error does not occur while uploading to any other site. 

I am going to be honest here.  Please try to listen and not get offended.

It just seems from where I am setting that the Stocksubmitter program is lagging behind when it comes to internet security.  When I first started using it, I never had to reenter user names and passwords each time I launched the program.  Then Alamy started requiring me to re-login each time and pass a CAPTCHA images test (which is really irritating).  Then Shutterstock started doing the same thing.  Now Adobestock is doing it but even when properly completed, Adobestock is rejecting the authentication. It is a massive pain in the butt! 

Now, I can log into all of these websites from a browser with no problem, never having to reenter my login info or pass a CAPTCHA test, because these sites TRUST the browser security and recognize me as the same user.

So, the question is, why are these sites not trusting a connect from Stocksubmitter and treating each contact as a new login, instead of recognizing that it is the same user from last time?

Now, don't get me wrong. I appreciate your program and it is extremely helpful, but I find it concerning that at every turn, you are being flagged by every security system on the internet.  Your website gets flagged, and your program cannot be installed without having to bypass Windows Security.  I have dealt with utterly thousands of apps and programs and yours is the ONLY one that I have ever had to do that. I would be remiss if I did not question why you are having such a hard time with the standard security protocols everyone else seems to have no issues with.  And it does not seem to bother you, which bothers me and begs me to question more.

Again, I appreciate you and your program, but I would like to see you spend a little effort on compliance with security.  Your site is flagged, Windows flags your program, and Stocks sites increasingly do not trust connection from your program, requiring users to go through extensive security checks every time your program tries to connect to them.  It is time to start fixing these security issues, ASAP!

Thank you for the detailed explanation of your concerns.
I will answer with the same level of detail to make it more clear why does it happen this way.

First of all, Norton has already replied to my e-mail and they've re-classified StockSubmitter website as "Technology/Internet" and not as a malicious website. So it was just merely a false positive detection result by their system.
And here we approach another issue you're describing - that some antivirus software sometimes detect the app itself as malicious and decide to block it.
Most of antivirus software rely on heuristics to analyze this or that app. This heuristics is not giving exact results (it's not possible by definition) but rather 'a probability' based on the patterns in the app compiled code that may match those of known viruses or on the list of libraries and system functions that the app is using. While the first one (patterns in the code) is pretty random and we get incorrectly detected as a virus (always some "Generic.Win32...Something", not a specific virus) by some antivirus software every once in a while just because we keep updating the program (sometimes multiple times a day) to keep it up to date with the changes on the agencies websites. So some random update may be detected by some random antivirus as malicious and the next update will be detected as 'clean' again.
The second detection reason - what does the program do - is even worse for us. The program DOES indeed connect to several dozens of hosts in the internet (agencies FTP servers, agencies web servers, our own server, etc.), including many automated requests (periodic submission attempts, earnings balance fetchings, etc.). It does use your hard drive extensively (especially if you keep your files in dozens of folders like many users do; add to that the program configuration folder; release folder; etc.). What other kind of programs perform the same level of activity?  Viruses, botnets, trojans, etc. So no wonder we get detected as a malicious software.
You may ask why don't other software that has the similar level of activity get detected as such? Well, there are not many programs that can be compared in terms of network and disk activity with StockSubmitter. May be a torrent client, a browser and similar software. But there are only so few of them and they all have 100-10000 times more users than StockSubmitter has just because there are only so few microstock contributors in the world. So antivirus developers keep adding them and their updates to their white lists to avoid them being detected as malicious software. They wouldn't bother to do so for StockSubmitter just because it has a few thousands of users, not millions. And even if they would it would be useless because, as I said before, we keep updating the program for it to still work after all the changes on the agencies websites.

Second, regarding the 'security standards'. It actually has nothing to do with security standards. It's more about (quite stupid if you ask me) ideas of the microstock agencies websites developers on how to improve their security.
A security standard is to use HTTPS protocol. Or two-factor authentication _if neccessary_. If you look at the shutterstock website it has only a simple captcha as a security measure and doesn't ask the user to re-authenticate every few hours like Canstock does. They don't use some sophisticated bot protection systems. And still, they're the biggest microstock agency out there and I believe their security engineers aren't stupid. They just try to not over-engineer and over-protect what doesn't need to be overly protected. Their security measures are just enough.
You've asked why doesn't an agency website understand it's the same users when you try to connect with StockSubmitter - it's because we do not have access to your browser's cookies. So their websites have no way to know it's the same user. We come to them as a plain new client without any previous browsing history. Just like you would if you would try to log into your account on an agency website in an incognito Chrome tab - your would face the same captchas, two-factor authentications, etc. There is no way around it except passing it and hoping the agency won't ask you to pass it again soon (which it shouldn't except Canstock due to their ridiculously short session life time).
Some agencies go further and use some complicated bot-protection systems or implement their own (Pond5, Creative Market and so on) which we have to overcome, because StockSubmitter is essentially a bot. That's the main purpose of the program - to automate your manual actions. And while many agencies appreciate that we help them to get more quality content from our users, other agencies do not share this attitude and refuse to cooperate to make things work more stable (which is plain wrong unless they don't really need more content). Of course we find a way around all those issues even thought sometimes it doesn't work as reliable as we'd like it to.

By the way, we've implemented a solution to resolve those captcha issues automatically - you can just enable the "solve captcha on our servers" option on the "Features" tab - that way you wouldn't have to solve it manually.
Why does it have to happen on our servers - because we're using a paid captcha solving services and can't just embed our access keys into the app as that would essentially mean sharing them with everyone and paying for whoever would want to use them for their own benefit.

Another possible alternative is to use Microstock.Plus - our web-based platform - that has the automatic captcha solving feature built in and that's whitelisted by some agencies specifically to prevent any issues from arising.
We're yet to resolve the issues with Bigstock but for other agencies it works pretty stable and easy.

Hopefully I've provided a detailed enough explanation on why things are how they are at the moment.
If you have any more questions feel free to ask me

Thank you for that detailed response.  I do appreciate you taking the time to try to answer my concerns.  I hear what you are saying and I agree with you on much of it.  The thing that bothers me is that, I simply don't have any of these problems with any other program, just yours. But then again, yours is the only stock uploader app I have tried.  So, I guess I should try some others to see if they have all these problems too, then I would know that it is an industry level problem and not a programming issue.

I do have one question though.  I understand that browsers use cookies so that you do not have to log in and like a new user each time.  My question is, why don't you use cookies to accomplish the same thing?

1. There are no other automatic submission programs in the market just because it's a very complicated and hard to support thing to implement. Most of the agencies do not provide any fixed APIs so we have to basically emulate a browser and update the program every time they change something on their website (even if those are some underlying changes that you don't see directly in your browser). Sometimes it takes few days to rewrite significant parts of code for it to work with an agency after changes on their website.
There are some apps that can _upload_ to agencies but that's a completely different level of network activity - they do so only via FTP so basically they act as a FTP client that's suited to work with microstock agencies only. And that's much less suspicious to the antivirus software (did you ever see a virus that would only upload files by FTP and not send any HTTP requests to web servers?... I didn't).

2. We totally do! Otherwise it wouldn't work at all.
So once you authenticate in StockSubmitter on a microstock agency website we keep those cookies and try to use them as long as possible.
We only ask you to authenticate again when the agency server redirects us to the login form instead of showing the page we've requested or returns an "401 Unauthorized" error or a similar one.

Still cannot upload to Shutterstock.  The upload makes it to 25% and resets back to zero over and over again until it reaches the end of attempts and then creates and error.  Have not been able to upload a single image to SS, but I have no problem uploading to any other agency.

Does it show a Timeout error afterwards in the "Errors" button?
If so, please try increasing the FTP timeout in settings.

Quote from: Niakris on April 11, 2020, 14:05

Quote from: thenatureguy on April 10, 2020, 02:29

Still cannot upload to Shutterstock.  The upload makes it to 25% and resets back to zero over and over again until it reaches the end of attempts and then creates and error.  Have not been able to upload a single image to SS, but I have no problem uploading to any other agency.

Does it show a Timeout error afterwards in the "Errors" button?
If so, please try increasing the FTP timeout in settings.

I upped the FTP timeout to 120.  No good.  I also downloaded Xpiks and used it to upload to Shutterstock with no issues.  So, logically, since I can upload to any other agencies with SS, the issue appears to be with the way SS talks to Shutterstock.

StockSubmitter is uploading photos and vectors via their website by default.
You can enable the FTP mode in settings (Manage agencies -> Shutterstock)

I thought I would check my 123RF account when I read this. I use Stock Submitter as an App, but then upload via Microstock Plus to the supported sites (which include 123RF). All my recent uploads are showing up in my portfolio so M+ must have been submitting them.

Steve

At the moment it costs the same as Stock Submitter (and no more if you use both). It basically means that if they support the agency, then the app uploads just one copy of the file to their servers and they onward upload and submit to the agency. Maybe not a great advantage with still photos, but it makes a big difference with videos

Steve

@thenatureguy

Yes, it's using exactly the same subscription model and they share the same accounts.
So you can use your SS account to log into M+.
They can also be integrated to keep using SS interface while the uploading and submission process is actually performed by M+ under the hood.
You can also sync the agencies login credentials and releases database from SS to M+.

===

123rf: if the files have _ready_ status after uploading it means they were not really uploaded - there was some error that you can check using the "Errors" button.

Okay.  I have a few questions about M+

1. When I upload to M+ via SS, the status indicator in SS is not registering the agency stats.  Is this normal?  If it is, how do I track what has and has not been upload to M+ via SS?

2. Since I have had so much problem with SS, I am not sure what has or has not been uploaded using SS.  If I upload images to M+ and submit images to agencies, that are duplicates of images that have already been uploaded via SS, what happens?

Shutterstock will reject duplicates, although it is not a great plan to send them many duplicate files. Better to sort out where you are with them and then start clean with M+

Yeah, that is a good idea.  I see that M+ syncs back information to SS about the stats of images.  That is good.  One my hugest battles is keeping track of what has been uploaded and what has not because I have such inconsistent results using SS. I think I am going to like using M+ a lot better.

I have another question.  If I am running SS on a desktop and a laptop (for travel) will M+ sync the stats of images with both installations if they are logged into the same account?  For example.  Say I am traveling and capture a bunch of images that I upload with my laptop.  When I get home I always back up my images to my desktop for safekeeping and long term organization.  Then say, I open this folder of images that were uploaded to M+ on my laptop in my Desktop SS app, will they show the same status as the images in M+?  Is that status information (i.e. ready, uploaded, submitted) stored locally in the image metadata?

Quote from: steheap on April 14, 2020, 11:35

Shutterstock will reject duplicates, although it is not a great plan to send them many duplicate files. Better to sort out where you are with them and then start clean with M+

Yeah, that is a good idea.  I see that M+ syncs back information to SS about the stats of images.  That is good.  One my hugest battles is keeping track of what has been uploaded and what has not because I have such inconsistent results using SS. I think I am going to like using M+ a lot better.

I have another question.  If I am running SS on a desktop and a laptop (for travel) will M+ sync the stats of images with both installations if they are logged into the same account?  For example.  Say I am traveling and capture a bunch of images that I upload with my laptop.  When I get home I always back up my images to my desktop for safekeeping and long term organization.  Then say, I open this folder of images that were uploaded to M+ on my laptop in my Desktop SS app, will they show the same status as the images in M+?  Is that status information (i.e. ready, uploaded, submitted) stored locally in the image metadata?

All the status information is stored locally in the image metadata, yes. In JPEG previews, specifically.
So if you have a video (for example) on two devices and want to copy the status information and metadata from one of them to another - it's enough to copy the JPEG preview.

Quote from: Niakris on April 14, 2020, 13:21

Quote from: thenatureguy on April 14, 2020, 12:36

Quote from: steheap on April 14, 2020, 11:35

Shutterstock will reject duplicates, although it is not a great plan to send them many duplicate files. Better to sort out where you are with them and then start clean with M+

Yeah, that is a good idea.  I see that M+ syncs back information to SS about the stats of images.  That is good.  One my hugest battles is keeping track of what has been uploaded and what has not because I have such inconsistent results using SS. I think I am going to like using M+ a lot better.

I have another question.  If I am running SS on a desktop and a laptop (for travel) will M+ sync the stats of images with both installations if they are logged into the same account?  For example.  Say I am traveling and capture a bunch of images that I upload with my laptop.  When I get home I always back up my images to my desktop for safekeeping and long term organization.  Then say, I open this folder of images that were uploaded to M+ on my laptop in my Desktop SS app, will they show the same status as the images in M+?  Is that status information (i.e. ready, uploaded, submitted) stored locally in the image metadata?

All the status information is stored locally in the image metadata, yes. In JPEG previews, specifically.
So if you have a video (for example) on two devices and want to copy the status information and metadata from one of them to another - it's enough to copy the JPEG preview.

What section in the metadata is this information stored?

All of the non-standard metadata is stored in the EXIF UserComment field in an encoded format.

Quote from: Niakris on April 15, 2020, 00:15

All of the non-standard metadata is stored in the EXIF UserComment field in an encoded format.

Is there any way to edit this data to mark images as submitted that I know for 100% positive have been submitted by SS, but SS failed to register this information on the image?

It's not easy if you would like to do it manually.
You can do it in the SS interface.

Quote from: Niakris on April 15, 2020, 23:29

It's not easy if you would like to do it manually.
You can do it in the SS interface.

The option in the interface can only be applied to ALL agencies, not to specific ones.  It would be awesome of you added to option to adjust the status of each individual image to each agency.

You can do it by clicking a specific agency status and selecting a new one