I seriously hope people don't start flocking to them and encouraging their new plan .. they are selling unlimited download subscriptions for $329 a year !!!!! Man who took over and turned that company into a huge piece of &*^%*%? I remember they use to be a major player back in the day.

Quote from: PowerDroid on April 01, 2010, 09:27

April Fool's joke or not, I wouldn't shed too many tears over losing 123RF.  I earned just shy of $90 there last month, and that was a BME.  Hardly worth the effort anymore.

Yeah, same here. I had a WME with just 984$ at 123RF, closing in on Featurepics with just 793.05$ last month. Not worthwhile. 

LMAO 

Well I say congrats to the Topekians on the uber high speed testing .. they need something extra for living in Kansas .. Living over the border in Missouri I can say that the coolest thing about driving across Kansas is when you tell yourself "In a few hours we'll be in Colorado !!!" 

I'm trying to opt out of all these cheesy hole in the wall micro sites and I can't find a partner opt out anywhere on FT. Anybody know?

huh ... never bothered looking at that site before .. how long did did they twitch around on the floor before they gave it up?

ahhh trying to shove their hands into every basket they can possibly think of .. from the look of downloads on the site they should probably stick to all their general consumer markets.

Don't bother going to BestBuy - they won't have what you're looking for either.

Your best bet to try something on will be to visit a camera shop the local pros and serious hobbyists use, which isn't going to be a franchised national chain type of place. If you don't know what/where that is, a call to a local commercial photographer or contacting a camera club will get you pointed in the right direction. These types of stores aren't high volume, so be prepared to pay a bit more for the convenience of having a bunch of stuff in stock.

I second that motion .. avoid shops in the mall like those Ritz & Wolf stores .. the mom n' pop shops carry all the cool toys 

I don't know but now I'm sitting here shopping for a new camera bag .. LOL thanks a lot. I'm thinking about a National Geographic Earth Explorer .. get me some kahki pants and hawaiian shirts to match it and I will be styling. 

I have a Lowepro CompuDaypack I use sometimes when I just need to carry a few things. It's a convertible style so you can keep a body and lens or two in the bottom. Then the upper area is divided into a compartment for a laptop and another that is basically open space. I use that compartment for tossing in things like a flash, cables and miscellaneous items that don't need to be in a little padded box. In the laptop compartment there is also a pocket that is just right for keeping a folder full of MRs and paperwork.

I wouldn't take it hiking because it's not streamlined for carrying tons of lenses and gear. It works great for times when your traveling with minimal gear and are close to civilization though. Mines maybe 3 years old and still look new .. oh yeah it also has a pocket on the front to hold a mp3 player with the hole for the earphone to push through. I use it to hold a PDA but since your biking you might like the mp3 idea.

Looks like they cut the price in half since I got mine too .. Here's one on amazon for $55 new and free shipping
http://www.amazon.com/Lowepro-CompuDaypack-Camera-Slate-Gray/dp/B000EY5R8C

that happens all the time. If you're lucky you might even see the pending time jump real quick from 172 hrs. to Under Review in only a couple hours 

I've worked behind the scenes for multiple agencies both inspecting and consulting for the last 6 years. I just can't agree with adding additional workload onto the admins .. like pointing out exactly what they need to fix and sending them cropped examples .. it's simply not a realistic business model.

Inspectors are paid to determine what is accepted or rejected into the library and that is it .. if they take it on their own to give out custom hand typed rejections to everyone they do it on their own time and lose money .. they lose a lot of money.

By adding onto the admins workload you slow down productivity. So I can see one possibility. Contributors be given option to opt in/out of an extended review process. In other words .. if you need training because you don't understand what an image is being rejected for then you pay for it. Every image that is sent back with a custom explanation deducts a fee from your account. This will still slow down productivity so the agency is going to need to be compensated. It will also effect the admins hourly rate so they too will need to be compensated. To maintain a productive business model and balance out employee wages on an hourly rate I would ballpark this as something in the lines of a $0.40 - $0.60 per image fee divided equally between agency/admin.

However, would it be worth implementing into a business model? It's similar to the keywording option on DT and I don't know anything about that .. how much it costs .. stats on it's usage .. etc.  If anyone would be able to run the numbers on an idea like this it would be them.

The simple solution. People need to study photography more before diving into microstock and then thinking they need to be given a detailed report when they don't get their images approved. Or at least they need to realize that it is up to themselves to learn what it takes to shoot on a commercial level ... I suppose this is the result from years of the agencies establishing a reputation of a being considered a community rather than just a company.

It's always great to brainstorm new ideas. When it comes to the review process everything has to be presented to the agency and not the inspectors. Regardless of which agency we are talking about the reviewers follow the guidelines and memo updates that are decided on by the agency. You use your judgement within a pre-defined set of rules. So if an inspector reads an awesome idea of how things should be done they cannot take it on their own to do it .. unless they want to get fired in a hurry. Just like any job in the world ... you do what the boss tells you to do not what you think is right. The company policy must first be officially updated with the new idea. With that said, I wouldn't count on accomplishing anything here because the odds of IS watching this forum over their own for ideas is pretty slim. If they were interested in discussing new ideas they would promote it on their forums.

1. This is standard practice for any agency. The title, description, category and keyword fields are always suppose to be checked.

2.a. Implement this idea and I'm guessing pending times will jump to 6 months within 24 hours. Plus you can forget your commission because company profits are going to be redirected to the admins otherwise they would all quit and the company would shutdown.

2.b. Same problem as above. Photographers have no clue to the amount of photos that are submitted everyday that do not come even close to being acceptable. People with no training whatsoever submitting shots from $50 point n shoots .. people who think you can take a 1MP shot with their camera phone in extreme low-light resize it to 4MP then submit it .. the point is an inspectors job is in quality control .. not educational training.

3. If you are referring to taking an isolated subject and increasing the canvas size to create copyspace ... why would you do that? The buyer is going to be able to do that themself to the exact ratio that they require in a matter of seconds. All this is doing is creating a thumbnail that wont get a buyers attention. Plus you are increasing inspection times with no benefit to the community.

4. I'd need to see an example of what you are talking about exactly. However, in any case a inspector should not ever have to consider if an isolation was accomplished in photoshop or with lighting .. if the subject is really an isolation it's either done right or it's not .. there is no grey area .. well there is but it's called a reject. 

If you want to try to make serious changes you are going to have to represent them to the agencies in the way they want it represented (if they want it represented at all). You will also need to come up with extremely well thought out ideas that improve the company, decrease inspection time (not increase it), etc. Efficiency and profitability is what will get their attention. They are in the business to sell quality images to buyers ... not train people how to take quality photos.

Another thing people do not consider is the design of the administration features of an agency. They are all custom and they are all different. A simple idea might be a quick implementation for one agencies structure and be a massive expense and nightmare for another.

It seems to be popular lately to say that there are also inspectors rejecting quality images to eliminate competition. I'm sorry but this is just a bit stupid. Let's say you own an agency .. an admin rejects a bunch of awesome images because they honestly believe that those images (out of millions) will somehow give them a better chance of selling their own images. What are you going to do? You're going to fire them immediately .. I would personally fire them and close their contributor account just because they tried screwing with my business. There is no competition elimination conspiracy going on .. sorry people.

I'm sure that people do get rejects that should have been passed. Especially if a growing company is in the process of training new inspectors to help knock down the pending times that contributors are complaining about. It's going to happen from time to time .. just a fact of doing business.

... and I doubt you have to worry about Leaf locking the thread .. it's pretty open here  .. I will say that there are better things to discuss though. A more productive method to solving the problems you stated would be for people to place more effort into studying photography and less effort into asking the agencies to spend more time teaching them how to use their cameras.