It doesn't appear that GI is deactivating our PP images, as in Thinkstock, even if the IS files are deactivated. How do we get those deactivated as well?

Count me as another former IS contributor. The heaps of abuse have piled up to the point where it no longer makes any sense to place images there. Deactivated 236 so far, and counting down.

A sad sad day, when you remember the glory days of Istock not too long ago.

Wow. What a thread! I can't add much to what's already been said, except that the warning bells for me really started to go off when the massive refunds began rolling in and many hundreds-of-thousands of dollars were so quickly and easily removed from contributors' accounts. Best-match tweaks and IT failures are one thing and yes a pain, but reversing so many payments at the expense of suppliers who have no power over the business owners' sales-fraud policies is on a totally different level, a street-thug level. I guess those refunds were made in the spirit of "money isn't what's going to make you happy."

Also, the Alexa trends are very telling, even if not indicative of actual profit$. I mean, a few years back I would have laughed loudly if you told me 123rf would ever pass IS in the Alexa rankings. And the speed with which they lost rank indicates some seriously huge problems.

And now a BIG BIG BIG "THANK YOU!", first to Leaf, and then also to the members/contributors who have made this site the most excellent source for stock news and camaraderie available in mature, sensible, and (mostly) well-thought-out discussions. IS has finally got the hint that "you guys are mad." Yet the overall sense here on MSG is that contributors are not running on emotions alone but are putting together sensible, intelligent ideas of how agencies can make this business better for the providers of their sole source of profit.

Thanks, Leaf, for building a site like this where honest and thoughtful opinions can be voiced and IS or others' management can't lock threads just because their failures are brought to the public light.

This place is the best! Let's keep it that way.

Quote from: cthoman on November 18, 2012, 15:33
Doesn't look like there is any reason it isn't real. SS seems like they are interested in reaching out to their contributors for their opinions and to get to know them, so this looks like an extension of that. Nice gesture. I say go and grab a free meal. 

Did he say it was free?  If it's not, tell the cashier you think you should only pay 38-cents for the meal, and do it loudly so everyone can hear you. See what happens.   

Ha! I envision the admins at IS pointing their fingers at the PDF payout schedule and saying, "Bad bad PDF file! How dare you not include all the holidays that we want to take off!"
  Yup, it's that stupid PDF's fault, isn't it?
  Just another TOTALLY unprofessional faux pas by a once-great company. Very sad.

Never in 6 years.

But maybe better not to discuss it in case the SS investors are visiting this forum. You don't want them to follow IS' very bad example of how to increase profits!!

Joke--

Teacher:  Johnny, why weren't you able to get your homework finished last night?

Johnny: Because my pet panda ate my keyboard and my mouse.

This is a little late, but I just found this entry from Lobo on the IS thread titled "Refunds now from March,"

Your going to find refund threads are going to be immediately locked down from here in out. There isn't anything the forums can do for you at this point. Send me a sitemail if you're mad. Any addition repostings will result in forum bans.
Thanks, folks.

"There's nothing the forums can do for you at this point". . . except to keep exposing the huge scope of the fraud that's being allowed to happen, so everyone can see it!

Just 3 days after I contacted support and started a thread on the DT forum warning contributors about their W-9's and SSN#'s being accessible to anyone logged into their account, DT took action. They closed off viewing access to the W-9 form/SSN # completely, and now you must contact support if you have questions about your W-9.   Wow! Somebody over there actually listens! I realize they can't and won't please everyone with the business decisions they feel they have to make, but this move speaks volumes about how they actually view their contributors.

Now, log in to you Fotolia account, OTOH, and as of this moment you're still be able to see your W-9, SSN#, and full ID-card scan. Of course, so can anyone else who logs into your account.  They've been contacted plenty of times in the past, but.....    'Nuff said.

Wow. What is so difficult about keeping our "personal" information personal? 

Karimala already pointed this out in another thread, but I wanted to start one about this subject in particular, especially as a warning for U.S. contributors. If you go to your main login page (My Dashboard), click on Edit in your Account Information, then go to Contributor Parameters, you (and anyone who hacks into your account) will see your SSN in plain sight. Your ID scan is also available there and can be downloaded with a right-click.
  Of course, it's on an https page, so that makes it perfectly safe, right? Apparently that's what FT thinks.

Thanks for pointing that out, Karin. I guess FT thinks as long as the page is in https format, it's completely safe. And, of course, the ID card scan is in plain sight and can be easily downloaded.

Totally unacceptable!

Quote from: Microbius on July 19, 2012, 08:53
Poor IStock, they had the high quality vector market tied up a few years ago, and they threw it all away 

Yeah, they also threw away everything else that they had good.  Such a sad sad story.

Kind of cool, depending on your viewpoint---a keyboard and mouse made out of bamboo:

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/07/going-green-with-impeccas-hand-carved-bamboo-keyboard-and-mouse/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+arstechnica%2Findex+%28Ars+Technica+-+All+content%29

Great observations, Peter!   I don't think anyone's mentioned this:  Why do they say "Space is limited"??  You'd think with a concept like theirs that they (and their advertisers) would want a regular and huge influx of photos since that should lead to more hits/searches and thus more traffic. Why give the impression of "a limited time only"?

Answer: Scam-Marketing-101-high-pressure-sales-technique to get as many gullible contributors in as quickly as possible.

Also, shouldn't a photography website have . . . . photos??  The only images I saw were from IS and SXC.

Stay far far away.

Sounds like next will be rejections for similar keywords: "Please do not use re-use keywords you have already used in previously submitted images."

Far-fetched? I hope so.....

Quote from: helix7 on January 18, 2012, 12:45

......The best thing that could happen to istock now would be for H&F to decide they want out of their Getty deal, and then for Getty to cut istock loose to some new buyer. Hopefully someone with the vision and sense to see what needs to be done to fix the company and to do it.

Jon Oringer ?

The Diamond estimating he's lost $12,000 because of the RC shift is totally believable.
I would guess few if any IS salaries have also been equally reduced or jobs cut to allow them to remain sustainable, right?
However, at the rate they're going there will soon be nothing left to chop except to make drastic staff reductions in order to keep them at that mystical "sustainability" level.
It is highly advised NOT to apply for employment at Istock in the near future.

Down 40% from 2010.

Actually, this is a golden opportunity for IS to increase their profits. They should make an announcement like this:

"In the interest of fair microstock trade and sustainability of our business model, our upper level managers and everyone else under them have decided that any contributors whom we discover uploading their images to other stock sites that are similar in design to Istock will have their canisters reduced to the base level and their royalties reduced to 0.1% for life."

Quote from: ShadySue on October 13, 2011, 22:12
Why hadn't they done their homework/research before opening the Editorial program?
It doesn't inspire confidence in the whole way the site is run these days.
But since I'm always swithering over Alamy or iStock for editorial images, this makes the decision much easier - who knows what they'll deactivate in the future, and not all editorial is something I can shoot again.
And yes, as noted above, an RM buyer at Alamy has actually to specify exactly what use they are going to make of the image, so that's one more layer of reponsibility which falls onto the buyer rather than the seller.

Does anything inspire confidence in how the site is run these days??

FT seem to be severely lacking in the business-brains department. When IS, or rather Getty, began to pull their slick moves with the royalty decreases, etc, especially lately, it really created quite a backlash. Many contributors have quit contributing, and quite a few exclusives are no longer so. Then, lo and behold, sales start to go up at other agencies, especially SS. What a coincidence! Even 123RF is doing better these days (wow!). Well, any agency with their ears open would have known that sweetening the pot at this time would be a winner for them. I was wondering if SS was going to do something to that effect, and here it is. Meanwhile, FT goes the opposite direction and basically begins squeezing off their lifeblood (contributors). No win for them. So now that they've decided the road they're going to take, it would be wise for other agencies to follow SS' example:  "We designed this product to attract new customers who aren't currently making purchases at Shutterstock."
Where d'you think those "new customers" will be coming from? SS is no fools. I just hope they stay the course for a long time to come. Those who follow SS' footsteps at this time in micro history will doubtless reap some pretty good rewards!

Well, all the images appear to be there still but now downsized to 1024 x ....

The DT license states:
"For Web use, you must not use the image at a width exceeding 800 pixels unless it is included in your site's design. If the image is part of a design and manipulated accordingly, the image width can be higher than 800 pixels."

At least downloading has been disabled. But you can still get a very decent up-res from a screen capture.
And the Flickr license for each image is still in the photostream owner's name, not the original artist's.

New files are being uploaded.

This image:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/64710715@N06/6172136499/#in/photostream

.....downloadable there at 4000 x 3778, free of charge.

I wonder how they got licensing approval from Disney:

http://www.slidesworld.com/ppt_templates/Download-powerpoint-templates.aspx/Disney-World-1011