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1126
« on: October 22, 2008, 11:54 »
I agree with the philosophy that it is a waste of time (and space) to keep up with which images are on which site. I agree. I work in batches of 10, and every batch has a number. Rows in XLS are batch numbers, columns are agencies and cell entries are upload dates. I don't see the point of tracking rejections really. KISS - keep it simple. 
1127
« on: October 21, 2008, 15:13 »
One month later...
I uploaded a test batch 3 weeks ago. I had to copypaste the IPTC keywords since they weren't accepted during upload. Then I suddenly couldn't log in any more. My passport copy was expired so I sent a recent copy. Still couldn't log in.
Used the "forgot password" option and that worked, but I still couldn't log in. Forgot all till today when I got a reminder. Seems that they accept a 13-character password but it doesn't work (without warning) but a 6-character password does.
Uploaded 2 batches of 10, one by FTP, one by the HTML form. The FTP-ed shots don't show up, the HTML-uploaded do, but the IPTC keywords are still not imported. It's not a question of separators since I used both 1-line comma-separated keywords and newline separated keywords with the same result (no import).
LO had the same problem end of 2006, but they eventually solved it. I fill in the IPTC with Irfanview.
Anybody submitting to Vivo and had the same problems?
1128
« on: October 21, 2008, 11:44 »
After 3 years of almost 98% approvals at BigStock, and after resuming uploads after a 5 months stop, if must have hit the new Atilla-class of reviewers too. Second batch had 6/10 rejects, 5 for 'no stock', 1 for noise. The "noise" one was accepted at SS and the "no stock" ones were accepted at DT. Say no more. I guess the new reviewer(s) has/have to lose some testosterone first. How long would that take? I just uploaded a new batch of 10 and will just see. If not, I guess I start reuploading when the DJIA is at 10,000 again. 
1129
« on: October 20, 2008, 01:29 »
Seems like istock is the first to say that they are more interested taking less photos and being picky, whereas it seems shutterstock is trying to get as many photos as possible. That doesn't mean that SS takes anything. They singled out the borderline cases (noise-wise) flawlessly in my recent stuff. I don't know that iStock is actually any more strict in their quality control, at least not much more strict - but their strict upload limits in a way, (perhaps hopefully for iStock) make people choose their top images first and upload only those. Not sure about that. I was thrown back to 15 per week and I gave up synchronizing my batches at IS with other agencies long ago. They don't like my "creative" shots that do well elsewhere and I got many rejects lately for keywords too. Bottom line is I'm not going to keyword and reduce vibrance especially for IS since it takes too much time. My earnings at IS fell below those at BigStock so I just cash in now and then and leave them in their blissful opinion that they are God's gift to stock. I do stock for fun, and IS is no fun any more. They should watch out if SS adds a tenfold of photos per month as they do. SS might beat them by sheer volume, especially since most upload the same stuff to SS and to IS. Perhaps IS relies more and more on its exclusives.
1130
« on: October 20, 2008, 00:25 »
PS: This is just page one  I can live with subs as long as it looks like this (Dreamstime):  Looking at the n/a as search term, I presume sub sales can attract attention to your portfolio and serve as engine for healthy sales. In my opinion, Dreamstime did the right marketing simulations for the balance between subs and normal sales. Subs shoud ideally be sales you wouldn't have made at all without subscription, without cannibalizing your real sales. If some sites become subscription-only sites in disguise, they'd better make up by sheer volume like Shutterstock. I dumped Crestock which has the worst of both worlds.
1131
« on: October 15, 2008, 19:39 »
Since I started this thread back in June, I still have had no sales. As I said, I have stopped uploading but unfortunately for me I have earnings there short of my first payout. How can you have earnings without sales? Referrals?
1132
« on: October 14, 2008, 20:27 »
Two days after I made my first post, I got a sale again on FP, the first one since July. Serendipity or synchronicity? I see from sales at other agencies that sales during American business hours have gone down, while European business hours are good, probably due to the fact that the financial crisis started in the US and has hit much harder there. Correct. If I want to have something to worry about, I would rather look at SS. The number of sales per day there for me are around half of what they were one year ago. Correct also. My earnings went down to 2/3 after a 6 months pause in uploading. When I resumed uploading again, sales took off for a few days. Then the crisis hit, and my SS daily sales the past 1-2 weeks have been at 20% what they used to be. Early sales (EU business hours) staid the same, later sales (US East coast) went down. Latest sales (US West Coast) are a disaster. It's hardly understandable since subscription packages span one to several months, and every day customers miss their download allowance, they lose.
1133
« on: October 13, 2008, 08:21 »
Reviving this old thread, I got worried about Featurepics. Being used to having 2-4 sales consistently every month, sales suddenly grinded to an halt after July 2008. That's hard to believe: a stop by deteriorating business should rather be gradual. Apparently, they didn't change the search algorithm too much, since my shots still pop up very well.
The question remains whether anybody else had similar experiences since July.
1134
« on: October 12, 2008, 22:56 »
Thats not correct anyway. Only one of my lenses is "DX". All other lenses working also on a full frame Body. Have you bought only "DX" glasses youll have to change. Yes I have DX. Actually I'm quite ignorant about all this. I really need a 50mm prime for studio shots as soon as I can manage to get softboxes thru customs and transport without considerable theft and bribes (this is still the Philippines) but is there a way you can use a FF 50mm on a D200? No rush though...
1135
« on: October 12, 2008, 12:29 »
mostly the lenses take the money. So if i decide me to change the company, ill have to buy all the lenses again. You will have to change glass if you go to full frame, whatever the brand. Nikon will follow soon, after the new FF 24MP Sony. They can't afford not to. That's why I still hold on to my D200 for now (from 10 to a 12MP D300 isn't really a significant step) and I refrain from buying glass for the moment, glass that would become obsolete with FF anyways. The body indeed is the minor part of the total budget including strobes and glass.
1136
« on: October 11, 2008, 12:09 »
By coincidence, I logged on to disaster site MostPhotos, and I noticed that around the end of March, I had a private conversation there with theMiz. Not that long, but this was really him: [17:53:21] rjmiz : u gotta come to NY where we can get u laid [17:35:16] Online FlemishDreams : saw it ;-) [13:31:21] rjmiz : Joined yesterday [13:31:07] rjmiz : Hey I'm new here I just now noticed why (profile photo):  Take care over there Miz... wherever you are.
1137
« on: October 10, 2008, 08:45 »
SnapVillage contributors come from 104 countries
Over 50% of SnapVillage contributors are from outside of Microstock was a conspiracy of the rest of the world to get back the money they lent the US to cope with its budget deficit. In a striking counter move, the US then lowered its dollar so much that it couldn't afford buying Chinese tools any more. This brought down the construction industry and consequently Lehman bros on their knees, so G Walker B had to nationalize them with more borrowed money. It's clear by now: the collapse of Capitalism and Wall street is all the fault of Microstock. 
1138
« on: October 02, 2008, 09:07 »
After an absence from Stock and this forum, I had a look at my MP sales.
I had one in February, one in March (days after uploading), and odd one in May, then nothing any more.
My MP index is still under 50 (newbie).
My conclusion about the philosophy of the site is this:
- The MP index is utter crap. I got my sales when the site started and when almost everybody had a low MP index, so buyers could choose on based on quality rather than based on some Flickerish popularity rating by submitters.
- Sales obviously don't count for the MP index. My highest rated pictures contain none of my sales, except one near the bottom of the list.
- I noticed some contributors have an MP index in the thousands, so my guess is they are the kind of rating/commenting whores that populate Flickr and Multiply. Some comments I got was "write your comment here...". Yesyes.
- Since I preferred to do photography and not some chatbox-like game, my sales obviously halted.
- Most probably there are rating clubs and 'friends' clusters.
- As predicted, the way the MP index influences sales clearly is counterproductive and no substitute at all for real reviewers, at the contrary.
In a country where the daily wage is about 4$, I consider hiring a job student an hour per day to randomly comment ('great shot','perfect dof','unique viewpoint', etc..), randomly rate between 7 and 10, and log in and log a few times to boost my MP index. If that's what MP wants, it can get it. To survive in Rome, do like the Romans.
On the other hand, this conclusion/strategy might be invalid if everybody has a breakdown in sales since June... which doesn't predict much good for the future of the site.
1139
« on: March 29, 2008, 08:53 »
I just began to upload there two days ago, got some immediate rating which didn't bother me, and suddenly, yesterday, four 1s. Just checked, they were given on two pics by somebody who registered the same day. He uploaded five pictures and gave 48 ratings. How can you see who rated you? I'm still having difficulties to navigate around MP as it's so slow, heavily programmed and loaded with scripts. The navigation map looks to me like the Gordian Maze ;-) PS - and I wish they would get rid of their spell errors. Looks so unprofessional. Your pictures are beeing uploaded... I can always hear the bees humming then I made an enemy myself, so I can expect a stalker re-registering too and flame me with 1's. Whatever...
1140
« on: March 29, 2008, 08:44 »
or were your meaning on bigstock? Yes and especially Talkmicro where the battle was very heathed that time with Dawn posting. But TM had a few crashes and lost stuff.
1141
« on: March 29, 2008, 06:58 »
If a customer buys an image from PM for 49 EUR, and later finds out that he could have bought it for less than 1 USD, will he ever come back to PM? I still don't see the logic of punishing the contributor with just 30% instead of 50%. The buyer doesn't know that, and PM still wants to sell it. That means the buyer will get the same bad feeling. It would be much more logical of PM to ask for exclusivity. You could adopt the strategy of uploading to PM first, and see what they accept. As I heard, they are rejecting a lot, so you could still upload the rejects to microstock afterwards. But since it seems their review process is very slow, you will effectively block your port for weeks when it could have made good money at DT, IS and SS. If you consider your shots as capital (they are), long review times are blocking that capital from producing interest. I probably was too fast on judging and I totally agree with your swing to midstock. I will leave Crestock and CanStockPhoto in the fall if they keeping selling my 10MP shots for my share of 0.25$, while MP sells exactly the same shots (2 till now) for my share of 12.5Euro. It doesn't feel right, even if the buyer will never know. It's interesting to mention the discussion a year or more ago about the BigStock-Crystalgraphics thing. While BigStock sells shots for 5$, their (secret at that time) affiliate Crystalgraphics sold the same shots for 70$. Dawn defended this practice by telling that every site has its customer base and it knows what the market there can take. It's a pity, but all those threads seem have to be evaporated. I just keep lurking on PM here, and how they handle review times and rejects...
1142
« on: March 29, 2008, 06:32 »
Odd... I raised mine up to double what they were at FP and have had 2 sales since then as well... so I'm not sure that is a direct correlation... There is of course no causal effect, but the least we can say is that a buyer isn't deterred by a 6 or 10$ shot, if he finds the right image. I always thought it's funny to see how some contributors complain about low prices at micro, and when given the change to set the price themselves (like at FP) they price their shots at 2$ The recent good sales at FP might just reflect a general trend across sites that the week after Easter will be the BWE. Customers apparently are doing spring cleaning too on their products and ads. As to ZYM, I trust their perception of the market they are targeting. It's their job and they have a good track record in business. I don't. I just like to take pictures and enjoy it tremendously. Let us become good in shooting and postproduction, and let our agents handle the sales and the pricing. As to midstock, yes, I'm leaning towards that too. Flipping hamburgers in Europe gets you 7Euro/hour 56Euro/day. Although the fun of doing creative things is priceless, we don't all have to end up like Van Gogh. 
1143
« on: March 29, 2008, 06:02 »
I'm on HP laptop with 2gb RAM, and 2.1ghz centrino CPU... Everything working fine...
I have the same configuration now (in Europe), a Pavillion. The only thing I don't like about is, is the LCD screen. I can't get it calibrated properly and colors are way off. I tried to attach a second monitor but Vista doesn't like me to change the settings. Next week I'm back for some months in SE Asia and there I have a super dual core desktop with 4Gig and XP64. I have to admit that PS goes much faster there, especially on math-intensive functions like noise reduction. By the way, it's pretty useless to have more than 2Gig if you don't run a 64bit operating system. A second observation is that XP still is faster and leaner than Vista. In general, when you Photoshop: - You'd have to close all other programs and work at one image at a time. Having several images opened in PS drastically slows it down. - It might also help to restart your PC before doing a long PS session, as there are always memory leaks after a while by previous programs, even if you closed them. - You might also want to remove all the crap that Vista loads when starting up, like widgets, messengers, itunes, quicmovie, zip, adwatchers, firewalls. - Just unplug your net when you're doing PS for a few hours. - And don't play music CDs in the background of course since that sucks up a lot of processing cycles too.
1144
« on: March 28, 2008, 23:25 »
I put my prices up at FP half March and as a "result", I got 3 sales since then. As to ZYM, they know the market they're in. Just trust their judgment and stay away from the prices they value your art. My 2 cents...
1145
« on: March 28, 2008, 23:21 »
I can't believe so many are wasting so much time trying to dig information about a crook. That's one of the forum laws. The less a site sells and the worse it is, the more posts about it. LO used to be the talk of town too.
1146
« on: March 28, 2008, 23:17 »
Some contributors don't like this regulation, but I can understand that they want to protect their market. Correct, I dislike that arrangement because it's stupid. Exclusivity is something else, but apart from that, they have no business where and for how much I sell. If they like to punish contributors that don't behave like serfs like iStock does, that's fine. No uploads then. Nice market protection
1147
« on: March 28, 2008, 23:02 »
1) Great job but you should add graphs. The text info alone is a lot to read. A graph would say more. 2) Yap you have to have your IPTC right or you can lose a lot of time reuploading or copypasting. a) If you have Vista, you can activate the " tags" column in the explorer and see immediately where you forgot tags; not waterproof since you don't see title and description. b) I always first FTP to FP, then go quickly through all the images there checking title, keywords, description at a glance. Correct in the file IPTC when necessary. So FP is my guinea pig to see whether all metadata are complete. They are very fast and it's easy to delete a file and reupload there. When all is well, I open about 10 tabs in SmartFTP, upload all at once, and take a shower or waste some time here
1148
« on: March 28, 2008, 22:43 »
my question is what do you have to do to get this? or have to give up to get this? Follow the link of Leaf. Check all types of licenses. Then apply this (1) to your existing port and (2) as default for your future uploads. Do it in those two steps. You should do it. It doesn't mean exclusivity, just more money with no extra pain.
1149
« on: March 28, 2008, 17:37 »
Sorry, not familiar with an "enhanced contributor" program at BigStock. Could you post a link? He probably means the Special Licensing commission when your shots can be sold at highly priced affiliates like CrystalGraphics. If you decide to take part in Special Licensing (you should!) you can earn up to $60 per image download. Average Special Licensing commission is about $12 per image. We highly recommend you opt-in to Special Licensing.
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