Quote from: Stu49 on December 14, 2010, 12:20
can we have Alamy on the list pls ??  now they accept smaller images ! 

+1

Still not working seems the "worst case" came in place? :-)

Approval Times are increasing in the last weeks for me and still keep being fair, best approval rate of all majors so far. However what is most important for me: Sales keep improving in the last weeks - so far definitely a Site I'll keep uploading to!

Quote from: sharpshot on November 02, 2010, 12:26
I uploaded some over 10 days ago but they are all stuck in "Images without metadata".  I can see the titles and keywords, they're OK with all the other sites, so what's gone wrong?

Same for me,any feedback is appreciated!

Auch Deutscher, aus einer Stadt die grad viel durch die Medien geht, Stichwort Demokratie! :-)

Quote from: tamasvargyasi on October 11, 2010, 16:57
Just two minutes ago I`ve got in. Hope it worth the wait.

same for me, just received my approval mail. Can´t wait to get started with StockFresh and wish all of you still waiting good luck!

Thanks again everyone for their feedback. In the meantime I got accepted (only 2 weeks ago) and already had a considerable amount of sales - hence it was worth trying!

Just a few minutes ago my first batch of images was approved - I uploadeded them right after Veer started their campaign, so 2 weeks for approval seem to be common. The acceptance rate in my case is about 65% which is exceptional good for me being a beginner still. So far so good, let´s hope the good news continue.

Quote from: louoates on May 28, 2010, 22:02
Is Yay still in business?
260 of my best = 0 sales this year.

Yes, they seem to be, had my first and last sale (only started a few months ago) in March. Not much but still better as others and I like their speed and service. Good luck to you!

Just had the following in my inbox - one more to go down this year already: 

-----

Dear contributors,
I am sorry to tell you that we have decided to shutdown Pixamba microstock collection.
Pixamba will be focusing on delivery of our innovative media management SaaS for stock imagery consumers.

The microstock collection at http://www.pixamba.com will go down on the week of May 3 2010.
All the images will be safely and permanently removed from our servers.
We'll send you all and any payouts you got with us before the shutdown.
Please feel free to write us to [email protected] for any question you may have.

Pixamba media management service will go live shortly after the microstock site shutdown. The new service helps imagery consumers organize and manage their archives offering instant search, convenient cataloging, built-in media auto-tagging and other unique features.

Thank you for being with us,
David Mail, CEO Pixamba

Just checked it and first thing I noticed: No water marks! No way I am going to upload there unless this is changed, you might as well label the site "web images for free" otherwise....

As mentioned elsewhere, a mentioning of views (or at least downloads) should also be present.

Quote from: Michael on April 17, 2010, 21:32

Quote from: franky242 on April 15, 2010, 17:24
Hey, I am happy to inform you that my first images got accepted by Polylooks and I even got the payments for those credited to my Zoonar account - unfortunately the acceptance ratio was not ideal:

I started uploading the images to Zoonar on Wednesday and applied for approval of the accepted ones on Polylooks this morning (CET).
The images carried an "applying for Polylooks" icon in the images managing section of Zoonar.

Now when I just checked my Zoonar account, I saw that some of them were accepted by Polylooks, the photos now carry either an "accepted" or "rejected by Polylooks" icon - having said that I need to mention that the approval rate is not that excessive - I am rather new in microstock with only a limited portfolio but the approval rate of Zoonar was much lower as with DepositPhotos for example and out of those Polylooks again only accepted about 70% (although the initial announcement to me sounded like almost all photos accepted by Zoonar will make it to Polylooks) so that my ROI is much worse as with the same images on DepositPhotos unfortunately, about 40%!

Hope others out there are performing better!

Sorry i overlookes your question, we have many to do now... My opinion for this is: It doesn`t help you when agencys took photos with mistakes. If costumers buy thoose pictures they will be unhappy and never come back. It`s better for you when stock agencys took a closer look to your photos. The mistakes they are  mostly causes deletions are: artefacts in blue skys, objective spots, unscharpness or unattractive photo design.

Michael, thanks for replying to my observations. However when mentioning the acceptance ratio I was not referring to the later success of the images but to the amount of images approved for payment of the 0,15 EUR credit: Now that I have uploaded my complete portfolio to Zoonar and went through the approval process of Zoonar/Polylooks for all of them I can tell that the acceptance ratio is smaller than even with the Big6 ones I upload to as well and that images that were accepted by the Big6 and do even sell there were rejected. That is all fine as it is a subjective decision by each reviewer/agency, I just wanted to state that acceptance ratios with Zoonar/Polylooks MIGHT be rather small - a fact that photographers might take into account when deciding whether it is worth to upload to these sites.

Hey, I am happy to inform you that my first images got accepted by Polylooks and I even got the payments for those credited to my Zoonar account - unfortunately the acceptance ratio was not ideal:

I started uploading the images to Zoonar on Wednesday and applied for approval of the accepted ones on Polylooks this morning (CET).
The images carried an "applying for Polylooks" icon in the images managing section of Zoonar.

Now when I just checked my Zoonar account, I saw that some of them were accepted by Polylooks, the photos now carry either an "accepted" or "rejected by Polylooks" icon - having said that I need to mention that the approval rate is not that excessive - I am rather new in microstock with only a limited portfolio but the approval rate of Zoonar was much lower as with DepositPhotos for example and out of those Polylooks again only accepted about 70% (although the initial announcement to me sounded like almost all photos accepted by Zoonar will make it to Polylooks) so that my ROI is much worse as with the same images on DepositPhotos unfortunately, about 40%!

Hope others out there are performing better!

Argh, I wonder how they will deal with their 15 images/week upload slots....

I use the good old Excel approach: Columns for the agencies and rows for each single image. Yellow colour in the cell means uploaded, green approved and red rejected. That way I can easily count acceptance ration of each image and also of each agency which is important information for me since I am rather new.

Randy, that can be explained: Polylooks was founded by Deutsche Telekom which again owns T-Mobile. They started off with a German site and rolled out to UK a few months ago - according to their initial press release, Telekom wants to complete their portfolio by a microstock portal, they run platforms like musicload, gamesload, softwareload, videoload - guess you could call Polylooks also imagesload! :-)
I initially uploaded a few photos with them but had only one sale in the penny range since then. I guess Deutsche Telekom has quite some money and marketing potential they could invest, however haven't seen too much of that over here in Germany yet. Their current offer to me definitely does not make any sense - someone at Polylooks seems to have seen the DepositPhotos´s upload bonus and came up with a VERY creative idea then. 

Quote from: stockastic on March 21, 2010, 16:57
They're all trying to raise their standards, but that's not as simple (or cheap) as it sounds, and they're trying to do it in a rush. So the numbers of goofy, inconsistent rejections are shooting up.  Somehow we need to get to a point where rejections are consistent and the reasons are made clear to the contributor.  Style and content are up to the individual agency, but standards for things like noise, "artifacts", white balance, focus and isolation could and should, I think, be roughly same everywhere. That's a long ways off I think.

Very good summary, Stockastic! I guess this covers the recent situation of approvals/rejections quite well and hopefulle, the standards will be there one day - better sooner than later!

Thanks for all your motivating feedback, seems as if I just need to try harder and apply again with improved photography. Will keep you posted.

Quote from: Magnum on March 20, 2010, 15:34
Quality should be ok if Istock approved them. Could be "no commercial" or something like that.   What was it?

One out of the 10 was okay, the others were not approved with more or less strange reasons but none of them was "no commercial", for example:

Composition--Limited commercial value due to framing, cropping, and/or composition. For those images:

http://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup.php?id=12001874
http://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup.php?id=12076785
http://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup.php?id=12289347 - I would have loved to shoot the whole Alps, unfortunately however I forgot to bring my helicopter :-)
http://www.fotolia.com/id/21041282

Or Poor Lighting--Poor or uneven lighting, or shadows. White balance may be incorrect. for that one:

http://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup.php?id=12174129 - that one was approved with ALL major stock sites...

Whilst those photos are definitely not the world best stock photos, they successfully passed eagle eyed inspectors nevertheless hence the rejection of my application came as a kind of surprise to me. That's why I am interested if anybody successfully passed their application process in the last weeks or if the are a bit "strict" at the moment as rumour says for iStock as well?

Thanks, Best, Frank

if you are contributing to IS, you should check the i$tock contributor app: http://itunes.apple.com/de/app/i-tock-contributor-application/id298053056?mt=8 - it gives you information about your account there: Balance, files, latest downloads, latest approvals plus it has integrated Access to the iStock contributor charts (http://www.istockcharts.de), very useful tool!

After numerous disapprovals of my initial 10 images application with photos that are accepted elsewhere (IS, FT, DT,...) I am wondering if anyone managed lately to get approved as a contributor lately with SS? Any motivating feedback is highly appreciated, other is also welcome since it might save me some time!  Thanks...

Quote from: jareso on March 20, 2010, 06:58
Had someone photo sales there already?

Yes, about a week after uploading (using the FTP account GLO provided really fast after mailing them), I got my first sale (http://graphicleftovers.com/graphic/hotel-bell-service-bell-317/ref=Franky242/) which came as a rather big surprise to me, being rather new in stock photography. By checking the views on my photos (I do not do any vectors), I can definitely recommend to upload there - they are fast, friendly and have a fair acceptance ratio!

Quote from: holgs on February 08, 2010, 11:47

Quote from: FD-amateur on February 06, 2010, 00:42

Quote from: lisafx on February 05, 2010, 23:48I don't know why.  Care to elaborate? 

You've got mail.

I'm sure a lot of us don't know why.

Indeed - mind to share your knowledge? Thank you!