It reads like they just picked up Lobo's replies to complaints on the forums.

More than that what would you expect or want ? It brings everyone who reads it up to speed which is great if you don't read the forums or miss something. I cannot see what the issue is with the newsletter.

And like others have said the similar images from the contributor or the series should come first

Those lightbox links often look shonky - and sometimes the links are even missing or dead - or code snippets left showing because someone has not checked their work. Or images not showing because the free hosting has failed etc.

I agree that allowing contributors to do the work of hand picking has real potential advantages. But a site also has to look good - it needs a standard look and feel - same formats, borders, layout, fonts etc.

So ultimately I hope that at some point they will find a way of building in a system around which people could add links to a standard format. But given that there are probably many more important things to do first I doubt that this is coming soon. Therefore pushing all that stuff down below the fold is not such a bad solution - in terms of the look of the pages certainly.

Incidentally - many contributors, some here, have been vociferously arguing that buyers should not be offered any 'see also' links. That they should only be shown the image which they have clicked on in search. That would presumably also mean abolishing contributor generated lightboxes.

@herg - why not post the image fullsize but watermarked to, say, Dropbox and put the link to the image here? Maybe someone at this community here will spot what it is that you have missed or be able to make useful suggestions which will help improve your chances of getting stuff through inspection.

@mantis - I am guessing that the distinctive pattern on the stock of that shotgun counts as branding.

Show me how well they treat their women. Then maybe we can talk about the "richness" of their culture.

They ? Like they are all the same ?

It's useless lumping people together as if you can tell what they are individually like or what their attitudes are based on where they are from. As if all people in a particular place act and think the same.

America and Europe often treat people (including women) incredibly badly and yet we all know that the US and Europe have rich and layered cultures.

This stereotyping of people is silly and ignorant.

Image downloads link to your e-mail as well. So in theory your could use this app to browse on your ipad or phone at your leasure and then when you get to your computer it would be ready to use. This seems like a pretty good idea to me.

Surely if the site is well coded then it will work whatever the platform and no need for a specialist app. Although, of course, you could still have an option to conveniently add it to your home screen as a web app - which would also therefore be effectively Android and iOS agnostic. Like how the FT does it.

A web page should not need a special app.

I only use PayPal to process credit card payments, so I dont have to worry about it but if a stolen credit card is used, I will lose the money, and the victim will get their money back. Not sure what your point is, as there is no middle man, the financial losses are inflicted directly on me.

In terms of the loss to you, is that effectively any different from a payment at one of the agencies being reversed ? Either way there is no direct financial loss - only (and I am not diminishing the importance of this) that your content is likely to be out there being redistributed and monetized in ways which will not earn you the royalties.

The point is that if you do enough transactions to make a business worth bothering with you are going to attract attention and get reversals. It seems inevitable currently. What I am wondering is whether there is anything smart in place which prevents, for example, someone turning up at your site and downloading the whole lot. Eg perhaps they have to make contact before adding more than a certain number to the basket, or something.

I guess that these are the sorts of monitoring issues which would need to be thought about before you could ever move to towards a unified buyer login experience.

It would be interesting to see what would happend in the next months.

I think there will be a full on price war on non premium content sooner or later. But I doubt that Getty and Shutterstock would need to square up against each other whilst they can both still put pressure on Fotolia, Dreamstime and the others. I do not believe that the microstock market is growing therefore it must be about taking market share. A price war could wipe out other microstock companies.

I think that Getty currently still has the potential advantage over Shutterstock in that it has businesses which represent all of the different price points. That could make Shutterstock vulnerable to a costly microstock price war. Getty could further slash prices at iStock and really start pushing Thinkstock, to lure Shutterstock customers without that necessarily affecting its premium or any other businesses.

The font is copyrightable, not what you make with it.

Fonts are redistributed under masses of different licences. As I am sure you know. Some permit commercial use of content produced using the font, others do not. Some specifically prohibit stock use of content produced using the font. Some require accreditation. Etc.

I am not sure how it works with vectors - but I suspect that, as with PDFs and 3d models, editable text using specific fonts means effectively embedding, and therefore redistributing, the font.

What if they offered Leo ridiculous $$$ for the site and code

The code is some version of open source IIRC. A bigger issue I have been wondering (as a spectator) - what happens if Leo one day decides to stop developing and or maintaining and fixing the code ?

Most successful open source projects I can think of have a much bigger economic base and therefore either a team of developers or, ultimately, money for code. It's hard with Symbiostock to see what the model is from the development side. That could be me not understanding it properly.

no one should complain as it gives site owners a lot of email addresses they can use for various promotional campaigns.

Ironic ... on a thread about spam

Certainly in the EU and some non EU european countries, wouldn't a business doing business with EU customers and collecting email addresses like that then be legally required to register under data protection legislation ?

Perhaps a simple way around having to bother with that might be to have your IT team set it up such that the login details are hashed and you cannot actually see them.

Dont ask about it in the IS forum or the forum n^z! will ban you.

J. Paul Getty Trust has no relationship with iStockphoto.

1.

Of course you need description fields. The average designer is not an expert on all things. Not all photos are being marketed to the ignorant masses. It helps the designer sell the image to the client if he knows something about the image and has some words to go with it.

Both Getty and Shutterstock seem to have done okay without a description field. Alamy does not let us post links or embed content.

I can see why photographs intended for editorial use need good captioning and an additional space for shoot notes etc can also be useful with those sorts of images. A something, somewhere, sometime picture needs a good caption. But I don't see why a generic RF non editorial off-the-peg stock image is ever going to be so specific that it would need anything other than a title and keywords. Surely if a picture needs a description then it should be properly captioned for editorial.

Anyhow - my point was that, if we are honest with ourselves (me included), the mish-mash of lightbox links, images hosted elsewhere, broken links, broken ubb code etc surely, at the very least, presents a case for moving the description field beneath the fold. And ultimately those pages surely need a uniform standard look and feel.

2. The title of this thread is "Someone else's photos are on MY PAGE". I suppose that part of what I am questioning, I hope in way which is polite and respectful, is whether it actually is "MY PAGE".

Has to be one of the worst ideas anyone over there has had. Wonder whose turn it was to 'think of something new' yesterday. Reveals all the keyword spamming and bad best match relevancy (where it exists).

I hate the way that on the internet opinion often tends towards tabloidesque superlatives such that anything is always either the worst or the best.

This looks quite sensible to me on the whole. Coupled with the simplified search options it isn't stupid. Perhaps the implementation needs to be fine tuned over time with respect to the content which gets fed into that channel. But they have to build it before they fine tune the content. It's a different window on the database. Why not ? The 'see also' channel is a potential marketing tool - it's going to sometimes work for us and sure it will probably sometimes go against us.

Some people think that it spoils the look and feel of the pages. Well I know that this is going to be a difficult thing for many people to acknowledge - but the look and feel of the site may be suffering from the mish mash of content in our description fields - lightboxes in all different styles etc. Pushing that lot down beneath the fold might be a good first step. Personally I keep wondering whether we really need a description field.

Why they thought that anyone doing a search and picking the image they wanted would want to see the irrelevant images they discarded again is inexplicable.

It is exactly analogous to a similar feature  on the web version of the Kindle bookstore - a feature which I use and which, I expect, many other people also use. There are always multiple ways to find what you are looking for.

Get the Best Match sorted. Penalise spamming and poor keywording. Give the crowd a financial incentive to wiki and act on it. When the search is poor, no manner of dressing up will help.

I might be wrong but I would doubt that they would be planning to sort out the keywords. I doubt that they are going to need to over time. Because with all new non-premium content on sale at the lowest price sales will decide relevancy*. Anyone searching by newest is going to get a mixture of often less relevant content but at much lower pricing. Buyers who choose to search by newest can probably do a better job on relevancy** than a relatively time consuming inspection process. Though my guess would be that exclusive content will get tighter keyword scrutiny for the moment at least.

*and quality
** ie building the relevancy data