|
MicrostockGroup Sponsors
This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.
Messages - bunhill
Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 [6] 7 8 9 10 11 ... 62
126
« on: March 25, 2015, 11:50 »
They're all out of carrots.
127
« on: March 24, 2015, 06:13 »
I will get a prominent message up on the site like Jo Ann suggested and see how that goes I think.
Why not, at least, have it so that a buyer cannot proceed to the payment page unless they either confirm that they are non EU or else enter their VAT registration details ?
128
« on: March 23, 2015, 16:57 »
I believe that there may (MAY) be a relatively simple middle route for people who do direct sales (especially if they are outside of the EU):
That would be to collect, and validate (if only the format), the VAT registration number at the point of sale. Because AFAIK the requirement to collect VAT only applies if the client is not registered.
Then you would potentially only have to reject sales if the client does not provide a registration number. And most businesses will be VAT registered. So you require a VAT registration number.
Not definite on this - but I think it may offer a way ahead. The Symbiostock people could pool their resources and get a definite legal-accounting opinion from which a technical specification could be written.
ETA: EU based sellers could do more or less the same. But there may be record keeping requirements which have to be followed.
129
« on: March 22, 2015, 11:12 »
It's honest opinion, not aggression. Also - I know a good deal about relational databases, SQL, systems analysis etc.
FWIW I have always been very positive about the motivation behind Symbiostock - whilst being honestly skeptical about the implementation and the lack of the sort of group structures which are typically a hallmark of successful Open Source projects.
130
« on: March 22, 2015, 09:51 »
It just doesn't seem serious. It's really slow and it looks like it comes from 1995. Plus the spammy ads.
And it's built on Access which will never scale.
131
« on: March 21, 2015, 17:36 »
Bunhill: please make difference between desktop and web server placed Access database. Concurrency restrictions can be bypassed exactly because the database is on server. For now after optimization Access capacity will be enough to give time to migrate to something more poweful.
No. Access is simply not scalable. It is a completely inappropriate solution. Anyone who knows anything at all about databases will tell you the same.
132
« on: March 21, 2015, 15:55 »
[Microsoft][ODBC Microsoft Access Driver] Could not use '(unknown)'; file already in use.
Surely it's not running on Access ? Can Access even cope with 2 users searching at the same time ?
133
« on: March 21, 2015, 13:12 »
Plus they got it right on the tax....I confess to taking the added precaution of obtaining written confirmation from support that my form was correct and that tax would not be deducted.
I am looking forward to seeing the detailed accounting for each sale. I am tax resident in a non treaty jurisdiction but completed the paperwork - meaning that I should be taxed at 30% but only on US sales. As it is I have I seem to have been deducted slightly less than 9% in US taxes. At first glance that should imply (I believe) that roughly only about 1/3 of my sales were US. However I think that the iStock sales at Getty Images covered in this accounting possibly pre-date iStock being US based.
134
« on: March 20, 2015, 18:17 »
Is this the search page? How much hourly traffic is it generating for that price? How many searches ?
135
« on: March 20, 2015, 16:16 »
They are still thinking it's 2006 or 2007 when they forced contribs to go thru all their images and 'disambiguate' them to match Getty's CV. They are also failing to understand that unlike back then, they are not the big dogs anymore and their pitiful sales don't justify the work.
I am certain that the CV is part of what is working against what they are hoping to achieve with SEO. I also think they should adopt a standard IPTC single caption/description field. I think they should abandon the CV as an out of date resource and labor hungry pre Google idea. I don't think they need to imagine that it is a one way street or that they are stuck with it. The Shutterstock search works just as well in different languages.
136
« on: March 20, 2015, 16:11 »
Welcome back Gostwyck.
138
« on: March 20, 2015, 05:56 »
I really appreciate your help - but this ExifTool software is not the most user friendly! 
I think I'll try to find a software developer to help me out.. 
I can understand you wanting to get someone in. But I would strongly advise you task them with building their solution around ExifTools. The guy behind ExifTools knows everything there is to know about metadata. And metadata is lots of different formats and encodings which is why compatibility is often an issue. You don't want to be paying someone to pointlessly re-invent the wheel and not do it as good. The person asking this question is trying to do almost the same as you and gets to the solution very quickly.
139
« on: March 20, 2015, 05:32 »
+++
It may simplify the solution if you copy the data to a high resolution final jpeg version of the file - ie with exactly the same name including extension. With the two batches (small and final) in different directories. Using that -tagsFromfile command.
ExifTool will write the metadata without re-saving the actual JPEG image - ie no loss of quality.
ETA: obviously backup all of your content before testing any solution
140
« on: March 20, 2015, 05:25 »
@ammentorp: I think that what skyfish is saying is that ExifTool may be able to do this for you without the need for the additional clunky scripting which I was proposing as a possibility. And I think that is true. The key to this may be -tagsFromfile I am very new to ExifTool. But there is a forum here where the author of the software and other experts answer questions like yours. That is probably going to be your best resource I think. At this point it would take me as long as you to work out exactly how to do this. But it is do-able. Very interested to know how you get on.
141
« on: March 20, 2015, 04:50 »
Do the TIFFS and the JPEGs have the same file names - and only the file extension is different ? Eg - imageAA.jpg and imageAA.tif want the same metadata. If there is a reliable relationship between the naming then copying the metadata transfer can be scripted - ie it can be done programatically. By looping through the list of JPEGs and, for each one, copying the metadata to the TIFF with the same name. Exiftool is the very best software for metadata manipulation. And is ideal for scripting like this. I would caution again using Lightroom for keywords - since it will mess up the order - it still insists on alphabetical order.
142
« on: March 19, 2015, 07:30 »
nobody believes start-up nonsense about "we're just here to give a fair deal to photographers" any more Bright, friendly, positive, upbeat, communicative and competent would be a great start - also flexible and can-do. And a genuine sense that everyone involved has a vested commitment towards making it the best thing ever.
143
« on: March 19, 2015, 06:22 »
"If we add subs, that'll do it! No, wait, if we lower prices, that'll do it! No, wait, if we delete descriptions, that'll do it! No, wait, if we make the descriptions longer, that'll do it! No, wait..."
Experience of previous initiatives has been that half way through the initiative is abandoned and never mentioned again. At best I believe this is a try-anything (costs them almost nothing) attempt to maybe slightly improve site traffic in general. Site traffic they lost themselves by progressively eroding the good-will which they once enjoyed. This still feels like the same old iStockphoto. I don't believe that anything will change until they decide to genuinely re-connect with their contributors and users. They need to be re-booted with a different team and a campus start-up mentality.
144
« on: March 19, 2015, 05:07 »
Spammy 50 word descriptions misspelled in pidgin and then auto translated into 10 languages are unlikely to improve the long term reputation of the brand or the ranking of the site. And that is a very possible scenario - given the well demonstrated propensity for keyword spamming. The issue here, as usual, is quality control. The likely results of this proposed free-for-all cannot be extrapolated from a limited short time-frame exercise involving professional editors and writers.
This exercise does not address the issues at the heart of why iStock is performing so poorly and I strongly doubt that it will have any significantly positive effect on the individual sales of the vast majority of contributors.
If iStock was actually about working with contributors towards improving the quality of the metadata including the descriptions .... That would be a different iStock. And that iStock probably would not have lost all that valuable traffic and good will to begin with.
145
« on: March 18, 2015, 06:16 »
Vetta was a great success in its early days.
Early Vetta was also somewhat spoiled by the collection being flooded with a lot of hammy artsiness which was never going to do well commercially - often produced by the very people who were supposed to be gatekeeping that collection. They were flooding the collection with their own pictures. It was iStock's black nail varnish moment. Like a mid life crisis. iStock was right to explore a sort of indy left field. But it should have been much more about lifestyle (they should have been embracing the hipster-indy aesthetic instead of becoming goths).
146
« on: March 17, 2015, 11:12 »
I think buyers on average will download a higher but relatively small amount more images, like 1 per day or something like that.
We can only guess. The only way to assess the impact of greater flexibility on buying habits and income would be to see how it went with a small sample selection.
147
« on: March 17, 2015, 10:46 »
If they were meaningless then they would have already allowed 750dls per month instead of having a 25/day limit. Buyers would rather have 750 dls they can use anytime during the month than 25/day. I don't think anyone will disagree that as a buyer you would rather have the monthly plan than the daily one, right?
You are going around in a circle with this (and flogging a dead horse too). If you were to advertise 750 dl/month lots of people would likely ask for half of that at half the price. Because it seems like a crazy big number. Where as, for most people, 25 per day sounds like more than they will need - but not massively so. It's just two different ways of describing more or less the same thing.
148
« on: March 16, 2015, 12:59 »
If I wanted insider secrets about Shutterstock I probably wouldn't be asking an iStock exclusive for them now would I?
As an iStock exclusive I am in awe of how well Shutterstock has been run over the years and how well they have behaved towards their contributors. ETA: my iStock RF is mostly very old legacy stuff. It's nothing special and very long in the tooth. I am in the middle of a coding project at the moment. After that I might well drop the crown since there is other stuff I would like to do when I have time. Unless they change drastically. With iStock - well it feels like Apple in the dreadful mid 1990s - when Apple was drifting lost in the wilderness and seemed certain to fail. But you kind of still wanted to like them despite the crappy products they were churning out - because they had once been cool.
149
« on: March 16, 2015, 12:45 »
If it looks good for buyers (which I assume it does or they wouldn't be doing it, right?) and it wouldn't affect their margins at all then why didn't they do this before?
I think it is reasonable to conclude that they have decided that in most circumstances, and for most users, a limit described as 25 per day is a number that people can get their heads around. Subscribers would probably look at that and think - that's going to be more than fine. That this has been the best way of describing the offer. Routinely describing the same amount of content as 750 per month would probably underline the huge quantity of images actually involved - probably way more than most people would ever need. And you would likely get people asking for, say, subs at half the price for half the content. The point is that most subscribers are not really buying 25 images per day or 750 per month. They are buying a service which offers so much that you never use your quota. But clearly they have identified that a few users may actually need more than 25 per day and they are being flexible about it. It seem obvious.
150
« on: March 16, 2015, 12:10 »
they won't won't download more than 25 in a day or if they do they will download less on other days so it balances out?
Exactly. Because at $199 pm Shutterstock would be losing money on accounts which downloaded the full quota. And they aren't stupid.
Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 [6] 7 8 9 10 11 ... 62
|
Sponsors
Microstock Poll Results
Sponsors
|
Show Posts
