The G9 is noisier than my A620??? give me a break... I don't have the G9 but it's got to be much better than that camera.

The nice thing about that hack is that it doesn't mess with the camera BIOS or anything permanent. It's a small application that you load on your card and you have the choice to load it or not when you start up the camera. If you want RAW on any of the Axxx series cameras, this is the way to go.

Right now, the best P&S camera is supposed to be the Canon G9. I have an older Canon A620 with the russian hack that always RAW capture and I've had quite a few accepted with that setup.

I'm not aware that Alamy requires GF for upsizing. I've always just upsized in Photoshop and save as quality 12 JPEGs.

I agree, you could've spent just a couple hundred more and bought a Digital Rebel with a kit lens and still be heads above any Point and shoot... You'd make up that money in a couple of months...

Tried to pass inspection at IS in August 2004... failed and came back a year later and passed with flying colors and have been uploading since August 2005, but haven't been able to give it my full attention so I still have relatively small portfolio, but have been giving it way more attention lately.

I'm getting back on the Alamy horse again after about a year... what's the current Q like these days? I just uploaded a batch and they said can be up to 25 days! I sure hope not...

I agree... I started this microstock thing back in 2004 and had a Digital Rebel. I never got rejections for sensor performance, noise, artifact or the like. It was always for composition. If you really want to take this business seriously, upgrade your camera to a DSLR. Even a used 300d would produce much better results than a new point and shoot camera (except maybe for the new Canon G9).

How many images do you have? Things work differently at SS and IS. Sales come quickly at SS and fall off fairly quickly. Sales come slowly at IS and build up over time and level out. It can take weeks before you start seeing sales on an image. On IS many times I won't see a sale for weeks and there seems to be some type of weighting towards people with larger profiles.

I searched for "fractals" at Shutterstock and got 95,000+ hits! I had a quick look at some of the newest uploads, man is there a lot of crap uploaded as fractals. Looks like people are uploading randomly generated Apophysis flames. The ones I have been working on have taken me quite a bit of time to get right and then the hours of rendering time. Way more work than photography. I'm going to upload a few and see how they sell. If I don't get much after a month or so, I'll just do it for fun...

I'm quickly finding this out. I just had a bunch of fractals accepted at SS and all rejected at IS. I have already had downloads at SS... Lesson learned... Do not upload fractals to IS. Not sure why they have made a decision to do that. I did a quick search in IS for the word fractal and found that they haven't approved an image with that keyword in about 45 days!

I hate up the dilution factor. We are all going to run into at some point (still not sure when that will be), but it's coming. There can't be endless amounts of uploads without equal growth on the buyer side of things. My sales have been flat at SS for over a year, but then I'm a slow uploader. This is probably why I do much better at IS and DT.

I've just discovered Apophysis and I'm amazed at some of the images it can produce. I've uploaded some of them to IS and SS. iStock has rejected everyone while SS has accepted everyone (only five so far). IS gave the generic "Thanks, but no thanks". My question is: can you make any money selling fractals at SS? I haven't tried DT yet, are they friendly to fractals?

What's going on this month at IS? We've barely half way into the month and I'm closing in on the amount I earned in all of November. I'm getting downloads from all over my portfolio like people are discovering some of my slackers... anyone else noticing this? Did they change best match again?

For the money, IS has been the best for me.

For ease of use it would have to be Dreamstime. I love that site...

This happens to many people. They have one photograph that carries their portfolio. The school photograph has over 350 downloads which is over half you downloads! That is lucky indeed. I had a similar photo that was getting a couple of downloads a day and got to about 150 downloads and then IS changed the search engine and I've had about 3 in a year...

I agree with leaf. I have many worthy stock images that just haven't done anything no matter how good my keywords are. If they don't pop at the beginning, then they just collect dust and get a few downloads.

Also did I read right that you have 20 images? You really won't see any downloads at IS until you get over 100 images. Things come more slowly at IS, but they last longer. I have an older portfolio at SS and I make less money there (although I get more downloads).

Same here. I've never been a huge uploader and it it shows with SS. My downloads there are about half the revenue as IS....

You need to upsize your photos. If you do a little digging, you should easily find out how it's done.

Alamy does both RM and RF and is considered a Macrostock site, but because they are the only one that is open to the general masses unlike Getty or Corbis.

Same here, just like over at IS this is an opportunity to rise up the search results because they are favoring updated keywords...

Quote from: hatman12 on December 08, 2007, 01:02
The price increases allow Getty to switch RF corporate customers to iStock.  There are millions of corporate accounts worldwide with big spending budgets - iStock doesn't need the once in a while or ordinary Joe customer.

Are you kidding me! That's exactly the market they should be going after, the millions if not billions of people that have an occasional need to put a paper together for something be it a term paper or church newsletter or whatever. Microstock has opened the world of stock to the masses and they really should advertise more to the mainstream...

Let me figure this out... you had 600 images rejected? One thing about Alamy is that sales come very slowly, but seeing hundreds of dollars for a sale can sometimes make up for it.

Time will tell. I'm sure IS has done a huge amount of market research around this and wouldn't raise prices unless they thought they could maintain the downloads. There will always be the people that shop by price and those that go for quality. IS has always had the highest quality with DT right behind and Shutterstock way behind. We'll see in about 3-4 months what happens...

Don't count your chickens before they hatch. I was around for the last big price increase a couple of years ago and on a portfolio many times smaller than I have now, I was getting more downloads a day than I do now (but making more money now). Meanwhile, Shutterstock has kept prices in line (for now) and I bet you see a bump in downloads at those places where prices don't increase. IS becomes less and less the dominant player in my agencies...

Things have been pretty flat or down for me since May of this year. Partly my fault for not uploading anything for six months and then starting to upload again in September. I'm only on three sites:

IS = 42% of downloads
SS = 28% of downloads
DT = 30% of downloads

Dreamstime had a really good month for me, it looked like it would almost catch IS in the last week of the month, probably because it is more geared toward the European market and it wasn't a holiday over there.

It also points out that these three all have some type of "staleness" factor in the search engine. Older images keep getting fewer and fewer downloads which I don't really think is fair since many of the images I take are more timeless and not always on the cutting edge of what is hip... So, keep the uploads going to keep your portfolio "fresh" and don't take a six month hiatus like I did.