My iStock sales are down about 15% this month compared to May.  It's not the summer slowdown (too early yet) so it must be all the search changes, best match changes and God knows what....

At the same time I've noticed a big increase in volatility of sales: my sales used to be pretty steady every day; now they are up and down like a yo-yo with near record sales one day followed by a slump the next.

Edit:  I meant to add that at the same time my sales at DT are heading very nicely north and this will easily be my BME there, so at least that compensates for the volatility at IS.

Best to just forget about FT and have another look in about a month........

Down here in OZ the site appears to be slightly faster than V1 but not significantly so.

Still many problems to be ironed out; no upload facility yet and lots of other little niggles and bits that don't work.

I reckon this thing could drag on for another month.

Of course there are many peeps waiting to upload, so when the floodgates open we can expect a pretty long bottleneck.

Well something must be wrong: not only will the site REMEMBER my log-in details; not only did it fire up first thing today, but I also got two sales at the higher prices.......

Hmmm.... this doesn't feel right; I mean this is Fotolia; it's not actually meant to work....

Looking at it seriously, FT have shown themselves to be a bit of a joke business; clearly underfunded, lack of cash, lack of resources and inability to service customers properly.  On the other hand they do seem to be able to sell my pictures, and every sale is to a customer in Europe, which does make them a bit different.

Fingers crossed I suppose......

Yes, life has got toughter at DT; they are becoming more selective; it the longer run that's good.  I too have a 78% acceptance and I'll do must best to preserve that because I think 75% comes into the search thingy.  It's a question of only uploading quality.

Funnily enough SS used to be the 'difficult' agency, with lots of poeple complaining about 'noise' rejections; but SS has been good to me; in 250 submissions they have only rejected 7 shots.

About 'old' pictures: I recall reading a post on the DT forums that there is a 'three month rule' at DT; pictures need to be there for three months before they sell. Whether that's true or not I don't know but my own experience suggests that for some reason that is the way it works out.

Nice soft shadows.  Good even lighting.  Looks like it works a treat.  Enjoy.

Just a fussy point - I'm not sure that particular image will sell due to the ball at the back being out of focus; whilst out of focus stuff is 'very nice', my experience says that with isolated stuff designers like to have everything in focus.

Well it's just come on-line down here in OZ (Sunday morning; probably Saturday afternoon sometime for the rest of you lot); seems to be much faster but I haven't tried uploading etc yet.

Shows 1.9 million files.  That still overstates the position, but IS A HUGE STEP FORWARD IN HONESTY and that is a very positive development.

Well down here in Australia we've had the splash screen on constantly with no sign of any access.

Of course the longer this goes on, the greater the risk that frustrated customers will look elsewhere for urgent image requirements and discover 'better' agencies.

I'm no techie, but it seems to me that if I had been managing this changeover I would've got the site up and running on the new servers, copied over all the required information, checked and triple checked, put the site out to a few hundred trusted customers for beta testing, then, when everything is confirmed as okay I'd press a 'switchover' button.

But then I'm no techie wiz, just a simple person.

Gut feel is negative; I reckon we might have several more days of this and then find that we are massively disappointed.

Another gut feel is that FT is short of cash; lacks the cashflow and resources needed to make this work; probably one IT employee working flat out 24/7 while the CEO goes out wining and dining in his Mercedes.......... but only a gut feel........

The problem with Fotolia is lack of credibility, which is something of their own doing; they have persisted in deliberately misleading customers and contributors with their '3.5 million' stuff (and probably also with their 'we sell 10,000 pictures a day').

Once a business or an individual gets used to misleading (lying) they'll dig a big hole for themselves because professional people simply aren't that gullible.

Like others here I suspect that this transfer to V2 will take days and they probably won't ne up and running until next week.  But that won't stop them 'misleading' by putting out reassuring announcements that they are 'almost there'.

Once someone gets used to being dishonest it is very difficult to change them.

Having said all of that, I do believe that FT has potential, and they do appear to be able to sell my pictures, so that's encouraging.

We'll see if I'm right though - an announcement that 'we are almost there' even though they probably know it will take all weekend.

And let's see what happens after they've deleted all those pictures from the past; will they change the 3.5 million number?  I hope so; I hope they'll see sense.  But somehow I doubt it.

I suspect that FT is short of cash; probably underfunded; probably one of those internet bubble situations where the CEO is paying himself $500,000 a year while the business and customers starve.

Perhaps I am being unfair.  I hope so, but we'll see.

Well, with only 13,000 images in the queue, only three days pending and new upload limits, iStock are suddenly introducing a new level of competition into the microstock field - they sell the most, now it looks as if they want to process the most and attract the most.

I should think the new search engine, and all these further developments will lead to a further price increase at the end of the year.  Would be nice to see another 20% hike and a larger hike for 'small images' which I think are priced too low.

To be fair to them - I think they warned they would down for at least twelve hours for the changeover....

I always planned to be exclusive at iStock.  But as I approach the 500 sales hurdle I keep thinking about eggs and baskets......

Yes, funnily enough this week has not turned out to be the disaster I feared it would be.