what are you saying shadysue? that Im a stocktal rep?

I said what I said, merely that it was an "incredible coincidence".
Don't put words into my stylus.

Hi Jack,

I have a small size successful vector portfolio and I uploaded 10 vectors (.zips) for 1st evaluation before I realized that you all were holding off on vectors....

What should I do?  Leave them, replace with .jpeg versions of them.

I think he was just coping jatrax. I doubt he is the type of person that is used to tap dancing. Hardly irreverent, seemed respectful to me.

Coping?  Sorry but I found quite a few of Jack's comments to be unprofessional.  I mean no disrespect to Jack, I have been guilty quite often of making flippant responses to serious comments.  But coming on to a public forum and standing up as the 'face' of Stocktal requires a professional demeanor.  This is not amateur hour at the local pub, we are discussing people's livelihoods.

I give jack much credit for spending a little time here and answering questions, I give him even more credit if he actually listens and considers the suggestions here.  But I take points away for comments like these:

Absolute nonsense. We are inventing the world. Imagine all the shackles that you desire.

Yaaaay - Anarchy at work.
Whoopee!
An Australian company does not collect revenue for England. Scotland can vouch for that.

I assume those were meant as jokes.  When you are hanging out with pals at the pub you can make jokes.  When you are the face of a multimillion dollar stock agency you should not be making jokes on an international public forum.  Not everyone's sense of humor will match and English is not everyone's native language.

And Jack, if you read this I mean it only as serious advice from someone who has had to transition from worker bee to company face.  It takes the fun out of things somewhat, but having a serious professional company face is just as important as encouraging a comradely, energetic and creative work environment.  There is a reason company spokespeople are trained to say things like "good thought, we will look into that", "not 100% sure on that, let me get back to you".  All you have to do to sell us is show you take us and our work and ideas seriously.  We are entrusting you with our intellectual property, the thing we make our money with, pay the mortgage with.   

Quote

Dear StockTal Photographer,

We have reassessed the stand on required category selection and the category section in your submissions page will be removed including the category instances found on the site. We hope this will ease some of the burden on you and you will continue to submit your wonderful creations on StockTal.

Best Wishes
StockTal

It speaks well for any company that has the guts to 'reassess' a position.  Too often corporate culture or ego or CYA gets in the road of improvements. 
Thank you Stocktal for listening and taking things under advisement.

Back when peter started stockfresh he stated that categories were useless and that's why he did not integrate them into stockfresh.  He would know since he used to run stockxpert for so long. So I don't think stockal is sacrificing and value whatsoever by killing categories.

Back when peter started stockfresh he stated that categories were useless and that's why he did not integrate them into stockfresh.  He would know since he used to run stockxpert for so long. So I don't think stockal is sacrificing and value whatsoever by killing categories.

yes, i remember stockxpert . that was one agency that would have succeeded
if it had been left alone. pity!

I just don't like the categories when editing and image. Hard to find quicky the best one.

It's surprising that they removed categories so quickly, given that "The marketing research we did back in February this year was exclusively buyer centric, without completely recognizing sellers needs", which implies that they put categories in because buyers had asked for it.
Hmmm.

Quote from: ShadySue on September 15, 2014, 06:29

Quote from: Julied83 on September 15, 2014, 06:18

I just don't like the categories when editing and image. Hard to find quicky the best one.

It's surprising that they removed categories so quickly, given that "The marketing research we did back in February this year was exclusively buyer centric, without completely recognizing sellers needs", which implies that they put categories in because buyers had asked for it.
Hmmm.

At least they are listening to contributers and willing to change.

Still, if their research showed that buyers wanted them, that should trump contributors' wishes, or at least send them back to another round of buyer research.

i was talking bout the categories you have to choses in to upload and image. Food, nature ... I don't like how it is.

I knew that.
My point was that they apparently did "exclusively buyer market research".
We already know that they know virtually nothing about this business.
So presumably the research would focus on features in most of the existing sites and see what buyers found useful.
As they added categories to their site, that implies the buyers said they wanted categories.
No matter how surprising I might find that, I'd expect the buyer research to prevail over what contributors find an inconvenience.
So what we have now is either an admission that their buyer research wasn't  thorough (i.e. they added categories without consulting buyers about it, whereas you'd expect the research to have been about every feature they were thinking of adding to their site - if so, what else did they omit researching?) or that they are ignoring buyer preferences, and even if categories are a few more clicks, I wouldn't be happy about over-riding what buyers apparently want.

I get the feeling this is more personal for you then business. We wanted them to listen to us, and they do. They are taking feedback on-board. Give them a break.

Your feelings are irrelevant.
Anyone considering partnering with someone or some company should  do a Dragon's Den/Shark Attack fine toothcombing of all their claims. That's business.

I'm actually giving them a break. Apart from pointing out the title/keyword errors on one photo on their front page, and the fact that the preview is blurry, I haven't mentioned any of the appalling keywording (mainly total lack of effort leading to only extremely generic keywords) on about half of the files in my area of interest, and the fact that their 'careful vetting' is about the same standard as iS's nowadays (probably a bit higher, to be fair). I'm not going to actually name and shame these, though.

Sure, no problem. Are you planning on uploadig to them? RM?

I was considering it - I'm considering other RM outlets; but I don't like the inconsistencies I've noted above.

You do have to wonder how solid the business plan is when they can change so many things on the fly.  That said: I'm hoping they make it. It's a pretty tough field to be setting up shop in.

If they are listening to us, then they will get rid of wanting us to downsize our files to 2 to 3 megabytes. They had better get this right, because once we upload to their small specs, and they decide to start accepting larger files, then the small files we uploaded will be at a disadvantage. That would be a big pain for all involved. It could mean a mass deletion of existing files and re-uploading the same files again at the proper resolution. More work for us, and more work for their reviewers.

The whole small size request is puzzling. Seems shortsighted.

Maybe they just don't have the means, technological wise, financial wise to afford the equipment and software to manage such big files that the solution was to limit sizes just so that they could get started now. Don't know just thinking out loud but it is strange.