From the iS forum (my emphasis):

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Posted By dcdp:

JJRD - do the recent issues point towards significant changes being made in the backend of the site? Or are they just ongoing recent issues? There does seem to be a recent proliferation of problems for which the fixes are being put off for some reason. I'd hope that, in the long term, these would be beneficial to all, even if, in the short term, they are painful.


Additionally, the buyers have been offered a 15% discount on credits purchased because of this outage as a short term apology for their difficulties. I suspect this will be worn by the contributors who have not only suffered from an ongoing inability to manage their own portfolio, upload images, and maintain their portfolio, but now have been unable to sell anything because, in the case of exclusive contributors, their sole distributor is off line. What will iStock do to recompense contributors?

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Posted by JJRD:

Let's focus on clients at this stage, come on - the site just came back.

Part of this massive technological overhaul is intended to facilitate everybody's experience with iStock - and it will.

So yeah, that's a big N.O. as far as I can tell.

Let me translate that response from JJRD. What he is really saying is;

"you ungrateful clod! Just being associated with itsock is your recompense! Now go back to making more images that we can sell and make loads of money off while we throw you chump change.  

Oh and dont make me send Lobo after you by posting some snarky followup, either."

ridiculous.  I just got back from the dentist - the left side of my face is numb.. I login to see if I have any sales.. and I get the ridiculous 1979sucks page.  what?  screenshot attached in case it changes and anyone misses this assinine thing. 

really, iStock?  can you also give contributors 15% MORE for what we are losing?? 

Quote from: luissantos84 on November 29, 2011, 14:20

Posted By joyze:

We are aware there are a number of bugs that are affecting contributors. Some of them are being worked on as I type and others are queued up to be addressed. Here is an update on the two major ones that are being worked on right now.


1. Royalty adjustments for the royalty issue we had two weeks ago - We've just received the reports from BI with all of the data. As you can imagine this was a task in itself to go through every download, look at the credits used, determine what value each credit was at, then work out the royalty rate etc. Our next step is to create a script that will email each contributor affected with a list of each download and what royalty is due for that download. Then we'll add the royalty owed as a bulk to your account. We are estimating this to occur on Tuesday of next week.


2. The 'My Uploads' page - The dev team is working on this one as well. However, they are holding off on fixing this until they get all of the bugs worked out of the DB release we did this past weekend. They don't want to create a fix on a system that is still being tweaked and adjusted. They have promised me however, that their goal is to have this bug fixed by end of next week as well.

Am I correct in interpreting the highlighted statements above ... joyze is implying that the IT team, instead of doing software development, is actually doing a lot of extremely menial bookkeeping work.  Apparently they are reading through reams of financial transactions and manually correcting them (with pencil and paper? and then updating a spreadsheet or database by hand?) ... and until they finish this menial job, they won't be allowed to actually do what they were hired to do, namely to write, test, and deploy software.

Another possible implication is that the "My Uploads" page is broken because they have a problem calculating royalties, and therefore they don't want to show anyone the specific sales per image - because if they did, contributors could immediately see that the wrong royalty rate was being used.  So when you see your "Balance" ticking upward, it may be based on the wrong royalty rate ... and they don't want you to know that until they have finished their manual corrections of the royalty rates AND THEN gotten around to "fixing the scripts".  Just speculating ...

BTW a question for IT nerds ... how could the "scripts" i.e. the programs be at fault for a royalty rate screwup.  Wouldn't the royalty rates be "data" provided by the business side of the company, which is fed into a script or program provided by the programmers and deployed by the IT operations people?  Did the scripts revert to the basic rate because the data inputs specifying the actual rates were missing or corrupted?  Or did someone provide the wrong data?

Question No. 2 for IT'ers ... does the referral to using "scripts" imply that they are using a fairly primitive programming environment?  E.g. based on Perl or some other relatively old technology.  I have no direct experience in it but I've heard people claiming that web sites based on massive amounts of Perl scripts are bound to fail eventually because of un-maintainability.  Especially when the scripts have become more and more loaded with "features" ... presumably in this case with a lot of complicated rules for prices and commissions.

the data is all in a database, so they need the technical savvy folks to be able to comb through the data, using queries and searches on the database,  and pull out the relevant stuff. I dont' think they are actually using paper ledgers for this, so it's not really bookkeeping per se, but it is dealing with our financial data.  

a 'script' in this sense is just a generic term for any sort of program that will automate the process. I wouldn't get jumpy about them doing something primitive.  it sounds like they need to create an automated process to send us all emails that will pull our specific data from the database and give us our stats.

Some of us had no choice, really and I was one of them. I thought November was the date for the move into TS, but so far I cant see any of my shots over there. Maybe they forgot? one can always prey.

they seem to be slowly getting moved over.  I had 3 there yesterday morning, 4 by the afternoon, and this morning I just checked and now I have 5 on there.  No particular order of the, either, it seems. 

I'm independent and boycotted the PP until I was forced into it. Since then I have not seen even a penny of earnings from the PP.

Here's an interesting scenario I've never seen discussed either here or on the iStock forums. Photos shot at an iStock minilypse can only be uploaded to iStock. That's part of the photographer's agreement going into the minilypse. Also, the model releases for the minilypse can't be used anywhere else. Therefore, unfortunately, minilypse photos must stay on iStock if I ever hope to recover some of the cost of making them. It would be very easy for me to walk away from iStock if most of my best sellers weren't taken at minilypses.

I thought about this, too, when I was contemplating dropping the crown last year as I have been to a lot of minilypses  (and even hosted one) and have some best sellers from those.  What I ended up doing when I went independent last November was to opt all my minilypse images into the photo+ program since I knew they had to stay exclusive to iStock and wanted to get the most money from them that I could.  I started with my best sellers until I used up all my slots.  then, having learned a lot from my attendance at minilypses, I took that knowledge and expanded on it to create new images that sell well and have been uploading those to the other sites as well as istock.

to reiterate (because I'm guessing someone might read this wrongly) I have not duplicated/copied my images from minilypses, I have just been more thoughtful in setting up shoots that are more stock-like when I schedule work with models.  I get a specific theme and location set up and get models and wardrobe to go with it.  I also work with a fellow photographer and together we have our own little "microlypse" type shoot.  It has worked very well for me. 

Losing customers is one thing. Losing PAYING customers is something else.

But if watching free downloads over the next 3 months shows fewer and fewer downloads, it would add to the data from compete.

I do think the type of file offered makes a big difference, so I really think it is not enough data in itself.

But together with compete, sales threads, etc...just another piece in the mosaic.

And again your own portfolio might still be doing extremely well. I know quite a few exclusives who are celebrating a record year. They did upload a lot of files and have improved the quality of their work.

Reading tealeaves, nothing more.

that is a very interesting statistic - the downloads on FIOTW.  I agree that the usefulness of the image makes a difference in the downloads but one could still glean some interesting and telling stats but looking at the overall month-to-month and year-to-year stats on the FIOTW downloads.  FIOTW is a "loss leader" designed to bring in traffic and turn them into buying customers.  If the overall numbers are dropping that would be an indication of a drop in buyers visiting the site - but of course just one indication and other factors would need to be looked at as well (such as the types of images being offered, the actual sales volumes in relation to the FIOTW downloads, etc).  We wouldn't have access to a lot of the data, but one would hope that the marketing staff at IS is looking at all these indicators.

Quote from: RapidEye on November 24, 2011, 14:13

Isn't one committing some sort of fraud by Photoshopping out parts of a legal document?

I've been using the generic Getty one for more than a year now, just in case.

I doubt if it would be fraud because the electronic copy is simply evidence that a legal release exists between the photographer and the subject. The presence or absence of a logo would not invalidate it. (I'm not a lawyer blah, blah blah...)

Right.  If called into question i have the original document on file without any white-out over the logo. . I am not changing the signature or any of the relevant parts of the contract.

If you now send a file to the House editors and opt for RM and RF your images will also be inspected with RM in mind. I know photographers who had images taken for RM. But you have to select the RM option when you upload.

Personally I only used two PC RM slots and don�t submit for RM otherwise. Did that change at some point, or was it different in the beginning? I must be getting old, I can�t remember.

Did you want to cancel your getty contract? Did they offer to keep you after you contacted them?

4 months sounds reasonable, I thought it would be much longer, at least 6 months like many of the other agencies.

ETA: you�re right, originally we only had access to RF. When they stopped the program they divided us into house and PC contracts. I was lucky I got the house contract. Sorry about the confusion.

But without istock or Bruce I would never have gotten into Getty.

Actually I would have been able to stay with Getty and sign up for the photographer's choice as well - at least that is what I was told.  Though the first round of the new contract was too sketchy for me so I decided to just close out of there and get my images back so that I could put them on other sites.  My contract with Getty was exclusive so I was not able to put the files anywhere else at that time, not even on iStock.  

I was told that my portfolio would be inactive and my files released once my contract was canceled.  the cancelling of the contract happened within a few weeks, as I recall, but they failed to remove my images.  I had to contact them regularly and keep checking until they were finally removed.  I have many emails going back and forth where they assured me the files would be removed, but it took 4 months for it to happen. that was NOT reasonable at all, since according to the original email correspondence I had with them when I canceled, the files should have been removed at the time of my cancellation, not 4 months and many emails later.  

needless to say, I never made much from my Getty portfolio, nor did I have a large portfolio there anyway.  It just wasn't worth it for me, though I know several people have been successful there, just not me.  "Quit your day job" was a great marketing campaign and I was ecstatic when I was able to join the Getty site, but the 60cent downloads were a huge letdown for me and so I quickly lost interest and didn't bother with uploading files there when I was making more with my files at iStock.  

one of their biggest issues is that many of their buyers are also contributors.  these are the buyers that are bailing the quickest, if you ask me.  I used to buy (and sell) exclusively with iStock.  When the rates starting soaring, I still contributed, but quit buying there, opting to spend my money elsewhere or creating the photos I needed for designs myself.  Now I'm not an exclusive contributor, though I still sell my work there, I don't buy there. 

I don't think they realized that when they started screwing with their contributors they were also screwing with a huge portion of their buying base.

somebody wake me when they give details.  this little game they play with just snippets of info to get people shouting "f5! f5!" in the forums is getting really old. 

October is looking even bleaker. Not a single download today. That's a first. Is there some kind of public holiday in the US today ?

next Monday is Columbus Day in the U.S.  some people have the day off, but it's not as widely "celebrated" (by a day off) as the other big U.S. Holidays. 

2000, oh boy.  I uploaded 14 to IS today and it took half the afternoon.  Likely could have sent 50 to 6 other sites in the same amount of time.   If their upload isn't slow enough, I had to go back to photoshop and stitch so many variations of releases together.  2000 sounds like quite an accomplishment of patience!

don't you use Deepmeta?  it's a lifesaver and stitches the releases together for you.

sorry to dig up an old thread.. but this was the closest to what I was looking for so thought I'd just add my question here..

if I want to remove a bunch of images on fotolia do I have to do it one at a time?  I tried selected all the images I wanted to remove but once I had them selected there was no option I could find that would allow me to do something (like delete) with the selected images.  what's the point of being able to select multiple images if I can't do anything with the selected images?