Quote from: ShadySue on December 14, 2010, 08:29

That's what I'd think if I were a buyer, but apparently lots of buyers buy what's popular because they think it must be good. I've read posts from buyers more or less saying that.

So why do you think contributors don't want it showing? What's the harm?

It's been posted on the iStock forums often. It's thought to lead to copying, and I'm sure to some extent, it does. I don't necessarily mean direct copying, but copying an idea. Better for the buyers (more choice) not so good for the contributers, sharing sales.

Quote from: madelaide on December 14, 2010, 04:09

I like the way Alamy uses the three groups of keywords for relevance, but I,do wish that photographer names was a separate field in the search form, like other sites do, and also that they would consider keywords in quotation marks. for example, I have images with "varig airlines" and "south american" and it appears in a search for American Airlines.

I'm under impression that Title words factor into search results, madelaide, so I'm guessing you got that American Airlines result because the words Airlines and American are in your Title, if they each appear only as part of a phrase in quotes in keywords.

yes, both title and caption are also searchable, so you have to be careful how you write them, and decide which words should go into the caption and which to the description. Sometimes a difficult call, trying to second-guess how a buyer would search, bearing in mind that buyers don't always think like 'I' (and, by extension, 'you') do!

In this case, evilclown did answer correctly, it just looks like he was in a hurry and skipped the first post about the loupe.

"Oh come on... where . is the view 200 images at a time option and the "sort by"
I'm getting really FED UP"

"The sort options are now right above the search results. More information here."

Which is correct.

The post about the loupe was the second post.
So it wasn't answered and locked so no-one else could help.
No-one in the forums has suggested to that buyer that she could sort by other than best match. I did SM her about that, but it seems she's pretty hacked off about her treatment in the forums, and I don't blame her.
How often do people post a question in Discussion and get told it should be in Help? She had a help question and was half-helped then referred to a thread in the discussion forum and the thread was locked. That is a great way to make a buyer feel that her concerns are being taken seriously and sympathetically.
I understand about being in a hurry and making a mistake. (t may be that evilclown has SMd to apologise. I suspect it's the same problem that affects some Support communications, whereby you explain the background to a problem before stating your question, and they see a 'trigger word' in the background preamble and send out a pre-packaged reply to that and don't actually get to your problem.
Doing it the other way round and stating your problem first, then your specific background leads to a cookie cutter response to the actual question without considering the particular information about your situation.
Not meant to be a rant against Support. Twice they've helped me when I didn't even know I had an issue (i.e. they contacted me out of the blue!) and I know that skim-reading for 'trigger words' is taught in other companies.

OT, but tangentially relevant:
H*ck, I tried to alert Virgin Mobile about a reseller chain which was actively taking customers out of their services and the reply I got was, "Sorry you had an issue buying our products, have your tried out shop", when I had explained that I had walked out of the reseller and gone to their shop, which was well out of my way, to get what I wanted - and tried a different branch of the reseller as an experiment. They had presumably only read the first paragraph.

Last one. Alamy using quotes, the way the search was designed. Sorry, no images were found for '"white rose potato"' In other words, it works.

actually, my point wasn't about "white rose potato", but since you mention it, there's a niche for an American Alamy 'tog.

My point was that because you shouldn't enter 'white wine', 'red wine' and 'rose wine', presumably contributers enter e.g. red white rose wine, so images of bottles/glasses of all three show up in a perfectly good and logical search for white rose.

Quote from: sjlocke on December 13, 2010, 19:55

I've seen no indication that Getty stuff will be trucked in.

Of course not. They're posting it as Good News.
If (I suspect it's 'when') they're going to 'populate' editorial, they'll tell us later.
(Logical speculation) And these will automatically be at Agency prices, ingested as 'exclusives' though not exclusive as we're 'golden handcuffed' to. The Getty togs wouldn't appreciate micro prices.
After all, they can hardly start advertising editorial until they have a goodly number of images, and at the rate inspections are going, and the backlog of editorial pics so many contributers on the woo-way (aka "I haven't thought through the possible implications") thread couldn't be bothered to send to Alamy or elsewhere, it could be some time before istockers uploaded enough to make it worthwhile to advertise.
Unless they've got a lineup of new Editorial editors on tap and waiting.
Look how long the Logos programme has been going and logos haven't gone live (yet).
I guess the editorial line has been brought in to help Kelly make his 50% target increase for NEXT year. After all, until very recently, word was that they weren't planning editorial in the near future. Now, suddenly, this. I'm not convinced iStock has any 'long-term planning' process.

Quote from: cclapper on December 13, 2010, 19:43

So it looks like they've changed the DL numbers under my images. Anything with 100 to 499 DLs says >100. It doesn't change until you get to 500 DLs then it says >500. My image with 1300+ DLs now says >1000. Talk about rounding down...

I'm not sure if this is a bug or feature, but I already put in a comment in the bugs thread that says it is a very bad idea if this was intentional.

A tremendous number of files are between 10 and 100 downloads. It used to be you could see >60 >40 - now it's >10 until it's in flames. Forget the contributor end for the moment, if buyers care at all about downloads as a way to gauge what's popular (my notion is that this gives them a sense of comfort when they aren't sure if they should buy something or not) there's a whole range of images that now look essentially the same and which used to show a little more precisely where the image stands.

i suspect it might be deliberate. Some contributers have stated that they don't like/want them. I do, as it gives me an idea of what it's not worth sending iStockwards, i.e. if there re 5 good images of X and they've sold three times between them, there's no point in sending my pic here as there's no market for X photos.

Quote from: lisafx on December 13, 2010, 19:21

LOL!  Surely there must already be some German word for this?  What a great language - they have words for everything!  (Schadenfreude springs to mind as an example, but doesn't fit this situation)

Good news - the search must be working better.  Sales seem to be sputtering back to life.

How can we trust the numbers? (rhetorical question only)

I see it's a rhetorical question, but if you've been following the Missing EL Bonus and the now-locked (unresolved) Contributers Underpaid Twice threads on iStock, you might well wonder.

There's a word or phrase which slips my mind for hiding bad news behind good or neutral news, or a scandal or somesuch.
iStock have managed to reverse this, by muffling the apparent good news of introducing editorial images (and, by the way, the iStockys results) with the unfortunately mishandled 'faceted search' introduction.
Maybe they should have a Contest to invent a name for this phenomenon.

I bet they get the commission cuts in January right

Of course they will.
Look how the 'get rid of the 10% EL for exclusives' was rolled out early and worked so perfectly they're having a very difficult job fixing it.

Interesting, I just did a search to see if there were (m)any others of a pic I was going to upload.
Surprisingly, very few (13), most wrong (because of bad keywording), and one of them was a Dollar Bin image, among a general search. At the end of best match, but there.

I just searched 'elephant' again, and every image has a red rectangle with the word SALE in it.
Does that mean it's on sale, or there's a cut-price sale on?
Added: no, that's just the Vetta images. I hadn't noticed the red Sale notice before.

The search is not looking too good at the moment.  Tried to do a couple and got no results.  Lots of complaints from buyers in the forum, meaning lots of free/low cost credits being given away, meaning we get less royalties for Istock's poor execution.

I'm getting single words (elephant) but not phrases (New York City)