Well since someone bumped this topic, I suppose I'll update you on what I'm doing. It's a sad story really.
I decided to go exclusive and started deleting and disabling my images from the other agencies I submitted to. All is well until I get to Dreamstime. I was aware of the 6 month hold before hand but didn't think a whole lot of it since I hardly uploaded anything in the past year so surely I wouldn't have a problem. (hahahahaha)
So I have disabled 99% of my portfolio off Dreamstime, down to 7 images remaining and then bam, can't disable anymore. After looking at their 6 month policy more closely (I foolishly didn't do so before hand) I realized you could only disable 30% of the files you uploaded in the past 6 months. Turns out, I uploaded 9 images in the past month. I could only disable 2, leaving me with 7. The 2 I had already disabled were not the most recent uploaded files so I went ahead and enabled 1 of them so I could disable my most recent ones. HUGE mistake. The 6 months start over again when you enable a disabled file.
OK I thought, surely Dreamstime will understand my situation and disable them for me, after all it is only 7 files. (well 8 now
) As you can probably tell by now, the answer was a big fat no. I even specifically contacted Achilles and offered compensation with no luck.
Needless to say I was pretty pissed off at this point. I had already deleted my portfolio from Fotolia and Stockxpert so there was no going back. A day later I decided that it would be worth it if I just bought the "sell the rights" extended license for my 8 files. The lowest you can set the price for that is $250. So I would essentially be giving Dreamstime $1000 to remove 8 files. (50% commission back to me)
I tried to buy one. It went through fine, the image was disabled right away. 12 hours later I get this:
We noticed that you purchased one of your images with sell the rights
license. Regardless of the reasons for this purchase, we strictly
forbid contributors to buy their own images, especially with the sell
the rights license.
We have refunded you the transaction and cancelled the purchase. Feel
free to contact us should you need further details.
So now I'm just out of luck. I went ahead and filled out the paperwork with Istockphoto to secure my next canister rank for when I can go exclusive. Also re-enabled my portfolio on Shutterstock and the other sites that I could. I'm not going to bother re-uploading to any sites so I'm going to take a bit of a hit financially.
The way Dreamstime handled my departure is completely different than every other agency. I understand that they are just following the ToS that I agreed to, but that didn't stop other agencies from letting me go. Hell some of them even OFFERED to pay out the remaining balance on my account despite it being below the minimum payout.
I had initially thought this 6 month policy was in place to cover the cost of reviewing and hosting the images. Now I think it is to make it more difficult to go exclusive to another agency. Why else wouldn't they accept $1000 to let me go? If they want to combat Istock exclusivity perhaps they should make their exclusivity program more appealing.
In the end it seems I'm just going to have to wait the 6 months. If exclusivity to Istock ends up not working out for me, Dreamstime is one agency that I will absolutely NOT be going back to.
So let my experience be a lesson for you all:
1. Don't be an idiot like me.
2. Don't expect Dreamstime to be accommodating to your situation.
3. If you have any thoughts of going exclusive to Istock, stop uploading to Dreamstime ASAP.
If there is any silver lining to this story, it is that I am more motivated to upload new content to offset my loss of income.