Thank you.

What are content review times normally like right now on Alamy?

Looks like you can't opt out anymore right now or again until next April?

I just setup a new computer, installed Deepmeta, and I would like to copy over all my Deepmeta data from the old computer to the new computer. I realize I could just download the data again directly from iStock, but a lot of the data in my existing Deepmeta install on the old computer contains file data no longer available from iStock, which I think is some data prior to 2017 which at one time might have been referred to as 2.0 data, but not certain. But I believe the only way to get all my data that I have now is to physically copy it over.

I am sure this question has been asked and answered many times, but I am not sure where to look for the information. So if anyone can please provide me the steps for copying my Deepmeta data from the old computer to the new computer that would be great. Thank you.

Agreed, Getty how about lowering the targets instead of increasing them to keep up with inflation and rising production costs and increased cost of living for their contributors around the world? But that's not their game plan obviously. Keep lowering prices in the race to the bottom and all the while screwing their suppliers even harder every year to keep the divide between the top 1% and the other 99% growing even more.

Quote from: PixelBytes on July 21, 2016, 21:12

Quote from: X9D7CE84A2B5Y on July 21, 2016, 04:10

Quote from: Reckless on July 21, 2016, 03:53
I would like to keep my port intact until I see how it is affected by the changes. If at that time I am dissatisfied I will close my account. I don't see that option in the poll.

Thank you. Just added.

Thanks for adding that option.   I already stopped uploading a couple of years ago.  They are now a much smaller fraction of my earnings.   I can afford to wait to see what happens.  If they finally put indie content on the Getty site, I might see an earnings increase.  Not hopeful, but curious to see what happens.   If it's all bad, I'll pull the plug entirely.

Your welcome. According to the 75 poll results so far it seems the majority of people are not planning to change anything on their contributor accounts. I am kind of surprised seeing that so many people in the other thread stated they had either already deactivated all their files and/or closed their contributor accounts based upon the July 14th announcement. Perhaps many of those people have not cast their vote in this poll yet.

60 votes have been cast in the poll so far. Thank you to everyone who has voted so far.

Quote from: iStop on July 21, 2016, 16:24
You may get iStock admins who lurk in this forum voting dubiously so they can sway and/or see the poll results. You may also get trolls placing fake votes to try and sway the results as well. Or other members placing votes who are not iStock contributors, just because they are curios to see the poll results.

Thank you and agreed. Like anything else, there will always be bad apples in a bushel. We can only hope though that people will act in good faith. And I would say we probably have more good apples on this forum than bad ones.

UPDATE: As of this moment, 40 forum member votes have been placed in the poll already. But poll results will only be visible now after you have voted. Please place your vote and poll results will appear immediately. If you are not an iStock contributor at present, please don't vote. Thank you.

3 new voting options in total just added to the end of the poll.

Quote from: Reckless on July 21, 2016, 03:53
I would like to keep my port intact until I see how it is affected by the changes. If at that time I am dissatisfied I will close my account. I don't see that option in the poll.

Thank you. Just added.

If you are an iStock Contributor, please cast your vote in this poll.

Don't worry, they will fix it with a 20% discount coupon on credit packs so that "you" pay for the outage twice.

Yup, sadly it appears to be gone. No more lightbox linking now. What a shame. I also don't think buyers can see how many times a file has been downloaded anymore. Descriptions no longer seem to show on image closeup pages anymore either. I guess images only will require a title now when submitting.

Quote from: Zerkalo on June 07, 2016, 13:23

Quote from: X9D7CE84A2B5Y on June 07, 2016, 12:48

Quote from: Zerkalo on June 07, 2016, 12:21

Quote from: X9D7CE84A2B5Y on June 07, 2016, 12:10

Quote from: Zerkalo on June 07, 2016, 11:01

Quote from: Mantis on June 04, 2016, 20:35

Quote from: X9D7CE84A2B5Y on June 04, 2016, 20:05

Quote from: PixelBytes on June 04, 2016, 19:52
So far looks like the extreme drops have hit both indies and exclusives pretty hard.

True, but what is very interesting so far (as of this moment) is that 6 indies have voted to say that they have seen no drop in income at all (which is amazing in itself) whereas not one exclusive has voted to say they have had no drop in income.

So far, every exclusive who has voted has had some sort of drop in income and I think we can assume that exclusives are also more inclined to add new content to the site on a regular basis versus independents who may not upload to iStock as regularly since they are presumably contributing to multiple sites and less focused on iStock itself than exclusives are.

The one thing I can say is that if things were the way they should be for exclusives, then shouldn't those 2 figures actually be in complete reverse?

Some may have started doing video to offset image income declines.  So while they may have serious declines in images, they make it up with video.  Just a theory.

I am an example of this. Exclusive on both stills and video. Last month was my BME (previous one was March 2016) on total iStock income. I am submitting more video since last 2 years. The GI income from mirrored stills/videos is balancing and even improving a lot recently.

We're talking about 4-digit numbers by the way. Just to give you an impression.

Thank you for the data. Two questions please:

1 - What year did you first start uploading to iStock as an exclusive? Was it around 2010?
2 - Have you continued to upload regularly since you became exclusive with iStock?

1- Yes, I started in January 2010.
2- Yes, I am not the biggest uploader but I can say that it's been regular without any long breaks.

Great, thank you. So it is really the GI sales from both stills and video you feel which has increased your income and provided the BME recently?

Also, have you seen an overall drop in income though on stills on the iStock site since 2012?

Yes, GI income (stills + video) and regular video sales is helping at the moment. There is definitely a drop on stills side since 2012. Both number of downloads and $ per download.

Great, glad to hear you are still doing so well. And thank you for kindly sharing all that information with us.

Quote from: Zerkalo on June 07, 2016, 12:21

Quote from: X9D7CE84A2B5Y on June 07, 2016, 12:10

Quote from: Zerkalo on June 07, 2016, 11:01

Quote from: Mantis on June 04, 2016, 20:35

Quote from: X9D7CE84A2B5Y on June 04, 2016, 20:05

Quote from: PixelBytes on June 04, 2016, 19:52
So far looks like the extreme drops have hit both indies and exclusives pretty hard.

True, but what is very interesting so far (as of this moment) is that 6 indies have voted to say that they have seen no drop in income at all (which is amazing in itself) whereas not one exclusive has voted to say they have had no drop in income.

So far, every exclusive who has voted has had some sort of drop in income and I think we can assume that exclusives are also more inclined to add new content to the site on a regular basis versus independents who may not upload to iStock as regularly since they are presumably contributing to multiple sites and less focused on iStock itself than exclusives are.

The one thing I can say is that if things were the way they should be for exclusives, then shouldn't those 2 figures actually be in complete reverse?

Some may have started doing video to offset image income declines.  So while they may have serious declines in images, they make it up with video.  Just a theory.

I am an example of this. Exclusive on both stills and video. Last month was my BME (previous one was March 2016) on total iStock income. I am submitting more video since last 2 years. The GI income from mirrored stills/videos is balancing and even improving a lot recently.

We're talking about 4-digit numbers by the way. Just to give you an impression.

Thank you for the data. Two questions please:

1 - What year did you first start uploading to iStock as an exclusive? Was it around 2010?
2 - Have you continued to upload regularly since you became exclusive with iStock?

1- Yes, I started in January 2010.
2- Yes, I am not the biggest uploader but I can say that it's been regular without any long breaks.

Great, thank you. So it is really the GI sales from both stills and video you feel which has increased your income and provided the BME recently?

Also, have you seen an overall drop in income though on stills on the iStock site since 2012?

Quote from: Zerkalo on June 07, 2016, 11:01

Quote from: Mantis on June 04, 2016, 20:35

Quote from: X9D7CE84A2B5Y on June 04, 2016, 20:05

Quote from: PixelBytes on June 04, 2016, 19:52
So far looks like the extreme drops have hit both indies and exclusives pretty hard.

True, but what is very interesting so far (as of this moment) is that 6 indies have voted to say that they have seen no drop in income at all (which is amazing in itself) whereas not one exclusive has voted to say they have had no drop in income.

So far, every exclusive who has voted has had some sort of drop in income and I think we can assume that exclusives are also more inclined to add new content to the site on a regular basis versus independents who may not upload to iStock as regularly since they are presumably contributing to multiple sites and less focused on iStock itself than exclusives are.

The one thing I can say is that if things were the way they should be for exclusives, then shouldn't those 2 figures actually be in complete reverse?

Some may have started doing video to offset image income declines.  So while they may have serious declines in images, they make it up with video.  Just a theory.

I am an example of this. Exclusive on both stills and video. Last month was my BME (previous one was March 2016) on total iStock income. I am submitting more video since last 2 years. The GI income from mirrored stills/videos is balancing and even improving a lot recently.

We're talking about 4-digit numbers by the way. Just to give you an impression.

Thank you for the data. Two questions please:

1 - What year did you first start uploading to iStock as an exclusive? Was it around 2010?
2 - Have you continued to upload regularly since you became exclusive with iStock?

Quote from: PixelBytes on June 07, 2016, 04:23

Quote from: X9D7CE84A2B5Y on June 06, 2016, 12:10
Now that we have had 93 votes on this poll, we have 20 independents saying their income hasn't gone down at all since 2012 and yet only 3 exclusives who say there income hasn't gone down over the same period of time.

For me, this is one of the most important aspects of the poll results so far. Yes, as many people have pointed out, there might be some discrepancies, inconsistencies, and inaccuracies on how the various contributors who voted have calculated their percentage of drops. But I think the issue of whether or not you have had a drop since 2012 in income or not is a pretty cut and dry matter.

Another thing I noticed over the last 18 months is how the best match on iStock hasn't really changed much at all. And what the best match mainly has been driving for the last 1.5 years is the newer content uploaded by exclusives and independents, plus some of the older stuff put up by exclusives which hasn't sold much in the past.

Seemingly, exclusives are no longer investing as much as they did in the past to create their new content, knowing that iStock has turned mainly into a low-cost subscription priced site. This means that the older exclusive content is probably much better quality than the newer exclusive content, if in fact many of the exclusives have even continued to upload at all. The current best match algorithm is also not showing the older and best selling exclusive content at the top of the search results, which results in minimal sales to exclusives of their high quality best sellers from the past that they spent more money to create.

So what does this all really mean for contributors?

In my opinion it means that iStock is discouraging buyers from easily finding the more expensive, high quality exclusive content and instead putting a mix of new, lower quality and lower cost indy content, with some older, poorer selling exclusive content which isn't going to interest buyers much anyway. And when the buyers see mainly a mix of lower quality pictures from the indies and exclusives together, they probably buy more of the indy stuff because quality of the two groups will be about equal and yet the indy stuff sells for only 1/3 the price.

I am not saying iStock is necessarily doing this consciously to make more money because of the fact they have a lower payout on the indy stuff. But maybe they are truly trying to promote the older content that hasn't sold much yet and to give the new stuff a bigger chance too.

But if buyers are mainly buying the cheaper priced indy pictures, rather than the higher cost exclusive pictures, it means the indys might not be seeing a drop income and the exclusives could be seeing huge drops of over 50% in income as the poll also has also shown us with 24 exclusives saying their income has fallen by 50% or more and only 14 independents saying their income has dropped as much too.

I don't know how you're coming to these conclusions.  As I read the poll, the indies that lost 50% or more are the largest group.

Yes, largest group, but similar in size to the number of indies who didn't lose anything. You now have 24 independents saying their income hasn't gone down at all since 2012. Second largest group. Yet only 3 exclusives say that their income hasn't gone down over the same period of time. Those 3 exclusives are one of the smallest groups and is only 10% of the number of indies who haven't lost any income. Simple math.

Quote from: VB inc on June 06, 2016, 16:36
I believe i was exclusive for most of 2012 and then went indie so my drop was huge. There didn't seem to be an option for that on the poll but i put over 80% drop...

Understood and thank you for voting.

Since you voted already I don't think you can change your vote, but perhaps the best thing to have done would have been to take your first month's income as an indie (after dropping your crown) and then calculated your percentage of income drop based upon your last month's income total.

Just for the record, how much of a percentage drop would that be?

Quote from: Justanotherphotographer on June 06, 2016, 16:12

Quote from: X9D7CE84A2B5Y on June 06, 2016, 12:52


The poll results do not show that anyone who voted has had an increase in income. It also doesn't give any indication of the size of their portfolios or that their portfolios have increased in size since 2012 for the people who voted. What data is your conclusions based upon?

Sorry, I meant "hasn't dropped", they could mean "stayed exactly the same to the cent", but I assumed increased.

My conclusion is based upon there not being any exclusives in 2012 with portfolios below a certain threshold, the threshold you need/ needed to pass to become exclusive and the ease of growing that portfolio in percentage terms compared to larger portfolios. I am basing that on how percentages work.

With the 2 new voting options I added, perhaps we will get some feedback from people who have seen at least a 10% increase in income since 2012.

Quote from: pixmicro on June 06, 2016, 15:33

Quote

Agreed, it doesn't confirm theories as to cause of income drops. But it tells more than that there has been a drop in income. It also shows the following:

1 - Many indies have not seen a loss of income since 2012 versus almost all exclusives who have seen some loss of income.
2 - The majority of people who have had a loss on income have seen a loss of 50% or greater. 

If you find that to be just a bit of fun, then no problem. But I find that to be useful data that we did not have before.

+1.

All in one, as we can read with votes already posted :
1. 75% of istock contributors have a drop in their sales (independent and exclusive)
2. Only 3% of exclusive has'nt dropped at all.

Just for curiosity, maybe you could have put also an item with 'My income has increased (by about x%) and I am an independent'... 

Great idea. It is a bit late in the game, but I just added the following 2 options anyway:

1 - My income has increased by 10% or more and I am an indepdendent
2 - My income has increased by 10% or more and I am exclusive with iStock

Unfortunately I could not put them at the top of the poll where they belong though as there is no option to change the order of things without disrupting the numbers.

I added them actually because perhaps there are people who are following this thread and haven't voted yet because they didn't fit into any of the existing categories. So now this gives them a chance to vote too.

Quote from: Sean Locke Photography on June 06, 2016, 14:13
Mine dropped 100% 

I'll add an option for 100% drop on the next poll

Quote from: Gannet77 on June 06, 2016, 13:23

Quote from: X9D7CE84A2B5Y on June 06, 2016, 13:00

Quote from: Gannet77 on June 06, 2016, 12:55

Quote from: Justanotherphotographer on June 06, 2016, 12:47

Quote from: X9D7CE84A2B5Y on June 06, 2016, 12:10
Now that we have had 93 votes on this poll, we have 20 independents saying their income hasn't gone down at all since 2012 and yet only 3 exclusives who say there income hasn't gone down over the same period of time.

For me, this is one of the most important aspects of the poll results so far. Yes, as many people have pointed out, there might be some discrepancies, inconsistencies, and inaccuracies on how the various contributors who voted have calculated their percentage of drops. But I think the issue of whether or not you have had a drop since 2012 in income or not is a pretty cut and dry matter.
....

Not really. There's a minimum sales threshold to reach to become exclusive on IS. The people who's income has increased are the ones who had very small portfolios in 2012, in other words much more likely to be independents.

Yes, statistically these polls have all sorts of caveats - they're from a self-selected group, the answers are unverifiable, they aren't corrected for increases in the numbers of contributors and images, size of portfolio, level of expertise or activity and no doubt lots of other things.

They're fun, but I wouldn't go drawing any far reaching conclusions based on them... if you are thinking of dropping exclusivity (or indeed going exclusive), base it on your own figures and aims, not what anyone else might think is best!

All agreed. But when I put up this poll I had some theories as to why my own income on iStock has dropped so significantly. Yes, the poll results may be flawed for all the reasons you mentioned, but so far the poll results have matched my theories. Pure coincidence? Maybe, maybe not.

The poll, assuming it's at all accurate (and it doesn't seem outrageously out of order or anything) doesn't confirm any theories as to the causes of income drops - it just confirms that, for many people, there has been an income drop.  I think most contributors (based on posts in this forum and others) already knew that!

It's just a bit of fun.

Agreed, it doesn't confirm theories as to cause of income drops. But it tells more than that there has been a drop in income. It also shows the following:

1 - Many indies have not seen a loss of income since 2012 versus almost all exclusives who have seen some loss of income.
2 - The majority of people who have had a loss on income have seen a loss of 50% or greater. 

If you find that to be just a bit of fun, then no problem. But I find that to be useful data that we did not have before.

Quote from: Gannet77 on June 06, 2016, 12:55

Quote from: Justanotherphotographer on June 06, 2016, 12:47

Quote from: X9D7CE84A2B5Y on June 06, 2016, 12:10
Now that we have had 93 votes on this poll, we have 20 independents saying their income hasn't gone down at all since 2012 and yet only 3 exclusives who say there income hasn't gone down over the same period of time.

For me, this is one of the most important aspects of the poll results so far. Yes, as many people have pointed out, there might be some discrepancies, inconsistencies, and inaccuracies on how the various contributors who voted have calculated their percentage of drops. But I think the issue of whether or not you have had a drop since 2012 in income or not is a pretty cut and dry matter.
....

Not really. There's a minimum sales threshold to reach to become exclusive on IS. The people who's income has increased are the ones who had very small portfolios in 2012, in other words much more likely to be independents.

Yes, statistically these polls have all sorts of caveats - they're from a self-selected group, the answers are unverifiable, they aren't corrected for increases in the numbers of contributors and images, size of portfolio, level of expertise or activity and no doubt lots of other things.

They're fun, but I wouldn't go drawing any far reaching conclusions based on them... if you are thinking of dropping exclusivity (or indeed going exclusive), base it on your own figures and aims, not what anyone else might think is best!

All agreed. But when I put up this poll I had some theories as to why my own income on iStock has dropped so significantly. Yes, the poll results may be flawed for all the reasons you mentioned, but so far the poll results have matched my theories. Pure coincidence? Maybe, maybe not.

Quote from: Justanotherphotographer on June 06, 2016, 12:47

Quote from: X9D7CE84A2B5Y on June 06, 2016, 12:10
Now that we have had 93 votes on this poll, we have 20 independents saying their income hasn't gone down at all since 2012 and yet only 3 exclusives who say there income hasn't gone down over the same period of time.

For me, this is one of the most important aspects of the poll results so far. Yes, as many people have pointed out, there might be some discrepancies, inconsistencies, and inaccuracies on how the various contributors who voted have calculated their percentage of drops. But I think the issue of whether or not you have had a drop since 2012 in income or not is a pretty cut and dry matter.
....

Not really. There's a minimum sales threshold to reach to become exclusive on IS. The people who's income has increased are the ones who had very small portfolios in 2012, in other words much more likely to be independents.

The poll results do not show that anyone who voted has had an increase in income. It also doesn't give any indication of the size of their portfolios or that their portfolios have increased in size since 2012 for the people who voted. What data is your conclusions based upon?