Here in the Netherlands it's working again, both the buyer side and the contributor side. And I have made sales, fortunately.

Hello everyone,

As you are aware, contributors that had opted out of Dollar Photo Club were inadvertently opted in for approximately 20 hours. Initially when the bug was discovered it was thought that this only impacted the search engine and that buyers received a 404 error if they attempted to purchase a license to use the file. We recently discovered however that some images were downloaded and licensed.

We are very sorry to everyone that this has impacted. To demonstrate our sincerity, any images belonging to opted out contributors that were downloaded while this bug was active were paid a subscription commission and now Fotolia will add a full resolution credit sale commission (standard license) to those effected. Those effected will see the additional commission in the next few days.

My role at Fotolia has recently changed. I have switched into a full-time contributor relations role. Contributors are an important part of Fotolia and I would like to personally prove that to you as we move forward. I can be reached directly via email should you have any questions, comments or concerns: [email protected]

Kind regards,

Mat Hayward

So images COULD be downloaded without our consent and opted-out contributors WERE opted-in after all! Why doesn't this surprise me? Therefore, the reply I received from Fotolia was simply a made up load of nonsense:

"This was a bug within the search engine. Customers were not actually able to download the images
and the bug lasted only 1 day. Opted out contributors are still and have remained opted out the whole time."

Two lies in 3 sentences. Congratulations.

Whether it was a (very sad, sad) mistake or not, copyright WAS infringed and those affected should be compensated much much more than a lousy credit sale commission to make things right.
Not only have images been made available, affected contributors have also unwillingly contributed to this horrible nightmare of a program called DPC.

A company that is unable to protect our images from appearing in the wrong search results is in my opinion highly incompentent and untrustworthy.

If this happens again, I will try to download one image to check if they're indeed 'not available to customers'.

The more I think about it, the more criminal this looks.

If any of our images on DPC have been sold without our consent, but we're opted out of DPC, they would not only need to remove our images, but also pay us an extra amount of royalties that was promised for those who remained opted in.

I'm willing to contribute financially to a class action lawsuit.

Can anyone check if there has been a sudden influx of images on DPC recently? Apparently all my files have been (re)mirrored again.

Either this has been done deliberately, in which case I'll close my account immediately, or this has been a very sad mistake on their part, in which case I cannot trust them handling my images with care ever again.

That weed portfolio I decided to skip to page 100 to see what his other subjects were about, until I found there are basically no other subjects. It's page after page of identical crap.

I have no new sales since May 6th. That's 20 days without any sales. Very odd.

Sounds like something is either wrong with the stats page, or Bigstock suddenly has stopped selling at all (even if it's not much).

Thx.

I understand - my sales started on April, 14 - so they goes only to the June, 15 payout.

A sale from April 14th should be paid on May 15th.

Quote from: ShadySue on May 16, 2015, 09:13

Quote from: fotografer on May 16, 2015, 09:12

Quote from: ShadySue on May 16, 2015, 09:08

Quote from: fotografer on May 16, 2015, 09:05

OK thanks.  Not sure if I am part of it or not as I haven't heard of it.

IIRC, if you're in Fotolia, you're likely to be in it. I think you were 'in' by default, but part of the campaign was only to be 'opt in'. You'd need to check.

Thank you.  I will check it out.

In case you miss it, I've added the msg links to my earlier post.

,
Thank you.  I've checked it out and my images are there.  I make between 31c and 42c for sub images at Fot.   I might be missing something but why is this any worse than any other site that does subs?

Because a basic subscription image pack at DPC starts at only $10.
Subscription profits mainly come from higher pricing points (say $100 for a subscription), buyers not using all of their allotted downloads and expiring downloads after the end of the month.

DPC's doesn't have any of those limits, so a subscription package is basically a disguised credit pack for cheap, for which you'll receive subscription royalties. It will in the end erode your credit sales if buyers would walk over to DPC. That's why DPC is good for Fotolio (more market share), but bad news for us contributors.

Totally depends on the subject. There is no sweet spot. For instance, simple loops vary between 8-15 seconds, sometimes they include an alpha matte, so then it's 16-30 seconds total.

Quote from: Noedelhap on May 14, 2015, 08:42

Quote

"But again, I get that some of the mapping options are funky looking, but they don�t impact search negatively. In fact, we put their content in front of way more searches for free".

That is the best way we can explain it. We are not stripping or spamming images with keywords.

Actually, the flunky mapping options putting content in front of more searches IS in fact sort of spamming. Because these images will appear in irrelevant searches.

Let's take an example from one of my images:

-image-

Veer keywords:

balls, reflections, shiny, spheres, drawings, shadows, silver color, nobody, white background, three dimensional

My original keywords:

chrome, ball, bullet, metallic, metal, silver, gray, steel, blurry, reflective, reflection, shiny, realistic, photorealistic, realism, clean, sphere, spherical, vector, illustration, drawing, white, shadow, light, shape, object, gradient mesh

(In bold are the (completely) missing ones.)

When I search for "chrome ball", my image doesn't come up, but colored web 2.0 buttons, rugby balls, soccer balls, stairs and chrome pens do.

Hi Noedelhap,

Your image appears for me in search and the keywords you listed are completely incorrect.

They weren't incorrect, I copied them directly from the keywords list. So they must have been added later...? Very strange. 

I consider the automatic keyword tagging an annoying feature. At first I had to manually remove all automatic keywords, which takes time.

Point is, I know perfectly well which keywords to use and a computer simply doesn't. Keywording is a task that should never be automated; it generates too many spammy and generic keywords.