Maybe there is some truth in statements about nature shots not being FT favorite :-) For me, it seems to be mixed. I have to little downloads to judge. I got a feeling that people shots tends to get more attention there.

Being software developer I can tell that if bug report like this show up on my plate I would dismiss it with comment "user error" :-)

It's weird, I'm experiencing super-fast reviews. Mostly rejections so maybe it's a reason. In last couple weeks it's same-day review.

I must be some new rejection trend since they made article about it. When I got this rejection it was clear that reviewer was taking IPTC caption as a title.

http://www.controlledvocabulary.com/pdf/IPTC_mapped_fields.pdf

Unless you try nobody can give assurance that you can succeed on SS. For me pictures rejected there are selling on other site or vice versa.

Unless there is an agency which is true marketplace, open and transparent to buyers and contributors we will not have knowledge about what buyers really need. Right know most agencies keep this knowledge for themselves. Some are showing which searches produces a sale but this is rather exception than rule. Betting on generic search engines is kind of like mimic our investing companies who did  not want to keep historic data for risk management and created formula which was based on current market performance of credit derivatives. When everything was going up there was a correlation :-) So I guess there must be some correlation with searches on Google but is it statistically significant?

Is it known to buyer if there are getting image from exclusive or not? They probably pay same amount. For agency, I do not know if benefits exceed cost. They have to share higher percentage of sale with exclusives but on the other hand they do not control them so tight as others, they assume that somebody who sold enough pictures already know what to do. I wonder what percentage of contributors are exclusives? If not high they are low maintenance contributors for agency.

At least a tripod and mirror lock-up should be used: it's impossible to judge amount of detail and noise filtering if the images aren't sharp. The test should also be done with correct color balance (if you don't intend to shoot yellow pictures all the time)

I am not saying it was very scientific test :-) Light was CF so white balance is set to fluorescent preset in LR. I just wanted to know what can I do without flash and tripod.

After initial 3 subs there was nothing for couple weeks and today I got first "real" sale :-)

I stopped worrying about rejections. My philosophy now is: "if you like it you can take it". I will not even try to read rejection reason cause most of them seem to be totally fake. Too bad cause I might be missing some legitimate ones. This is really bad situation they are overwhelmed with volume of photos we are over saturated with huge number of rejections. Until one of the sites invents solution for this problem I do not see chance for getting better.

I just wonder why video is so important in DSLR???

I never uploaded there. I sent DVD twice and both are now processed so I am just sitting and waiting until they transfer my account ;-)