...Simply respond to them in a kind fashion and explain them your situation.

I would suggest you write a polite (no snark) note to support explaining that you were confused by the signup process and only opened the second account because you thought you'd made a mistake with the first. Apologize for that and ask them to please remove the warning as it was an unintentional error.

No sense starting out with warnings you don't deserve.

If you do decide to upload to SS, I suggest you try to view the process of uploading your work with a little less emotion. They will accept or reject your submissions on the basis of what you upload, not on how many year's experience you have or how many items you have to upload  (and yes, they do have a very uneven inspection process, but that's the reality of dealing with them). You'll drive yourself crazy if you react to rejections the way you did to the automated message about opening multiple accounts.

Good luck

Quote from: stockastic on June 08, 2017, 12:35

They've tried to corner the market by lowering prices until competitors gave up.  Now, having completely devalued their product, all they can do is cut their operational costs to the bone and try to Make It Up In Volume...

Their prices have gone up a lot from when they started.  I don't know why people keep peddling this lie?

Yes, but...

At the beginning, when their collection was tiny and they had only an all-you-can-eat subscription for $89.99 a month. It grew to $119, $129 and then in 2005 $139 but with a 25 a day limit. Collection grew and prices did increase for a while, but there have been cuts along the way in prices for ELs, On Demand, Video and most recently the sleight of hand with lower cost subscriptions for a lower volume commitment (the only way the subscription model makes sense from a contributor point of view is that you trade low prices for high volume) which effectively was a cut-rate on demand sale as well as a lower cost of entry.

They have clearly made most of these cuts because of competitive pressure (largely Adobe) and for a while, the high value SOD sales mostly made up for the other cuts, but now they've effectively "disappeared" most of the high value SODs, that feels like another cut, albeit of a different sort.

Has SS changed much over the past 15 years? I wonder how much of the current system is band-aid'd 15 year old technology.

Look at part of a glassdoor review (from April 2017) of a departed software engineer

"Preventing the company from having high uptimes is a massive pile of tech debt, the fixing of which is often prioritized out of existence. Several attempts have been made in splitting up the monolithic Perl app that runs the store into several smaller microservices; however, since no resource planning, performance measurements, or any other sort of proactive actions were taken by the developers, the microservices have only increased the number of single-points-of-failure. Compounding issues is a relatively-new directive that all new services *must* be written in NodeJS, and while this is a positive trend from the previous directive of "you can write your code in any language you want";, the extremely-questionable choice of NodeJS was made by a small committee of developers, with no input from other teams in the company.

As such, development at Shutterstock is a nightmare of Lovecraftian proportions, which both developers and infrastructure being ill-equipped for the scale and challenges that need solving. Projects at Shutterstock used to be in pretty much every language under the sun (Java, Python, Perl, Ruby, NodeJS, and Go used to all be supported runtimes), so it's commonplace to be handed code in a language you're unfamiliar with. As a result, services are rewritten every time the assigned developers change (which is frequent, due to high turnover), and as a result, there are many instances where two or three microservices running to serve the same function.

The developers themselves are a mixed bag. As stated in Pros, there are some very smart people here, but they're sadly dwindling in number as the days go by. Instead of hiring experienced developers to replace them, managers instead hire very-inexperienced developers, often right out of college, or very inept developers, who actively make poor coding choices and lower the overall stability of the site further. Since these developers often function by pushing untested code into production with minimal test coverage, problems go undiscovered until they cause production problems, and only after several hours of looking at red herrings first.

The toxic nature of the culture at Shutterstock means that teams are rarely willing to work together, instead hoarding infrastructure resources and institutional knowledge in blind grabs for power and prestige. Shadow infrastructures are commonplace, only being discovered when they cause production outages or break in some other way that affects the developers who created them. At this point, the Infrastructure team is expected to support and fix these solutions, without being given either the manpower to do so, or the authority to remove these teams' abilities to create their shadow servers again. As a result, the infrastructure is in a constant state of flux, and a recent decision to move the entirety of the infrastructure to the cloud was both poorly-justified and badly-planned, and will lead to more outages in the future.

A lot of these faults and problems lie squarely at the feet of management, who have to be among the most inept group of executives I've ever worked for. Middle management is easily the worst, with good management is often coached out of the company, replaced by others who are too busy playing politics to manage effectively. There are way too many middle managers, and others are promoted to management positions without experience or a clear directive. As a result, managers often battle with one another over responsibilities and power, and burying each other in meetings is far more common than it should be. This directly affects morale and productivity, and engineers are often paralyzed into inaction for fear of making the wrong move and losing their jobs.

At the C-level, the poor performances continue. The CEO is a megalomaniac who micro-manages the site and the work teams are doing, often wasting tons of resources and time by refusing to allow more-qualified employees to handle the day-to-day operations. The tasks he sets are almost always impossible to complete on time, and he has no qualms about dismissing managers that he feels have failed him, even if the failures were due to his poor planning or lack of understanding of his own company's technical stack. This further increases stress and fear among the engineers as well.

Overall, working at Shutterstock is a frustrating, unfulfilling experience, and there is almost certainly a better company in NYC that would make better use of your skills, and respect you more as a person. Avoid!"

For what it's worth, I have trouble with clicking on the stars with my Wacom tablet too - but I don't think it's new. I also had all sorts of problems with selections via the tablet with the old interface as well (and my tablet works just fine elsewhere).

Mostly I find the mouse (which I keep on the desk just in case but never use outside of for Alamy or if the Wacom driver crashes!) works just fine, but I use it so rarely it's hard to know.

Given how long it took them to deliver this new uploader, I'd hoped for something better...

In addition to the comments above, I would add that your keywords need to be improved. Many sites do not include titles in the search, so with this image for example you don't have man or woman in the keywords - "one young man" is from Getty's controlled vocabulary and on other sites it's actively harmful as no one searches with that language. On SS, it appears they search the title, but on Fotolia, your images aren't found if your search includes man or woman.

In this image, you don't have young but you do have 20-29 years, you have talking but not chatting, you have indoors in the title but not the keywords.

There are tons more examples, but you need to get solid comprehensive keywords describing the people, place, interaction, ethnicity, clothing, etc.

Some of the styling looks really odd to me - strange clothes or strange setting. This may be a US vs. Europe thing - and that may be fine - but you might want to try and broaden the appeal of generic images. If it's supposed to be something local, then put the city or area in the keywords so it'll get found. Examples here, here and here. Iron the shirt! Why is the cupcake in a knocked over teacup? With images like this, include the place (city/state/country). Not much of a market for large tire lifting??

A lot of stock is about giving buyers the expected and saying the obvious, so things that don't look "typical" sell, but not in the quantities you might like. Hope this helps

I just received payment this morning from Crated - I had apparently made a sale March 10th (I did find the email but hadn't noticed it at the time).

The timing of the payment is a bit off though - it is supposed to be by the 15th of the month for all sales made by the 15th of the prior month.

There's some wording about the date of shipment to the customer, so let's assume that pushed a March sale past the 15th as a shipment date. Even so, I should have been paid by May 15th and they've pushed that out to the end of the month this time.

I did get paid, so that's good, but moving out payment schedules is never a good sign (and I did check the FAQ which still says the 15th)

...
I did find a couple of things interesting. One is that it if you add up the payouts from 2010 to 2016 and compare that to the revenue for those years (from the 2016 annual report), payouts were 24.8% of revenue. They have claimed several times that they pay out about 30% of revenue in royalties (28% from the 2016 earnings call transcript)....

I received email earlier today from Shutterstock Contributor Support saying that they'd seen my post here and wanted to clarify that the payouts in the infographic were not all payouts made, just those to Shutterstock image & video. So payouts to other brands are not included, but revenue from the other brands is in their 2016 numbers. So this explains why the percentage is different.

I asked them if they'd like me to correct this and was given permission to use the information in their email to do so. So I have

I didn't realize they still checked in here...

[Mind if I ask you why you wouldn't trust Depositphotos with your images?

They have a long history of saying one thing and doing another and pursuing shady deals of one sort or another. One of the biggest was in providing content to a web site for ShotShop where work was sold for high-ish prices but the DepositPhotos contributor was paid a subscription. That was bad enough, but they included portfolios that had opted out of partner sales, trying to justify it saying it wasn't a partnership but an API deal.

http://www.microstockgroup.com/depositphotos/the-german-shotshop-reseller-of-depositphotos/

When they first started, the fact that the company had previously been a file sharing site didn't inspire confidence. Then I received email asking me to upload my portfolio and offering a "deal". When I asked about that, the return email said I would get preferred search position and wouldn't have to start at the lowest rank. That seemed truly awful on two levels. 1. The buyer wants the best search results, not some loaded dice, and 2. you can't actually follow through on that promise with more than one person - what happens to my preferred placement when the next newbie is offered preferred placement too.

That combination of shady and stupid really turned me off, and every time I thought about changing my mind, there'd be another report of a problem (typically found here) and so I never ended up joining.

Depending on what's in your portfolio, I'd suggest you give Alamy a little longer. They don't sell in high volume, but the sales value is typically higher and so it can be worthwhile.

I wouldn't trust DepositPhotos with my work. I left CanStock, 123rf and BigStock because of low sales and dropping royalty rates. I have a small subset of work at Pond5, but I don't upload there any more as sales for photos are at best occasional. I have a portfolio at Dreamstime but they're circling the drain and I no longer upload (as they don't reduce the royalty rate when sales tank, I'm willing to let the existing work hang out).

My last 5 sales at Alamy netted about $95 a month (those are from April & May) -  that's a reasonable low-end site to have for me. The only issue you'll face is that sales take a massively long time to clear, so you need to be patient...

In addition to the above, don't send an ID image via email. It really should only be uploaded via a secure connection. I'd also suggest, for your own protection, that you try providing them a version with the numbers blurred out. They should accept that and it makes it harder for anyone to misuse it in the event a site's internal security is crap and someone gets their hands on the JPEG

Never having had to call abroad, I'm not up to these technologies, but I'm guessing that the other person also has to be on the Skype or Internetcalls system? So if they choose not to be on these, the technologies wouldn't work.

VoIP doesn't require the other party to have specific software.

With Skype, for example, calls to another Skype user are free. You pay when you call a non-Skype phone number, so there's no requirement for the other party to have any software - just a phone number. What you pay varies by country and phone type (I think they still charge more for calls to cell phones).

And Skype can be great for calls anywhere, not just overseas. If your internet connection stinks though, it's a pain

Their Facebook page has a post from April, as does their Twitter account, so they are still around in some form. Have you considered becoming a public nuisance in your request for money? Sometimes businesses behave better when their misdeeds are given a public airing. Waiting four months and asking via email with no reply seem to indicate that escalation is reasonable...

An article about the agency when it started (2008?) said that Generation Four Company LLC in Kuwait was behind it. Perhaps you can dig around locally and find the people behind it to try and ask them about getting paid?

In the Uploaded files section, on the far right panel, at the bottom, are the words "Delete files". Click on that. It's a bit confusing in that it's not a button or otherwise highlighted (unless you hover over it)