I opted out when they changed the payment structure. Anything $28 and up I say yes to. Anything less I say no (customers contact support and they can process the license without opting you in).

Clearly I run the risk that some customers won't want the hassle, but for an EL (versus a regular sale) I'm willing to bet that many aren't in such a rush that the wait is an issue. The highest I've received for an EL this way is $40

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/edited-transcript-sstk-earnings-conference-151945094.html

Investor presentation

http://investor.shutterstock.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=251362&p=irol-presentations

Earnings

http://investor.shutterstock.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=251362&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=2192912

Not a lot of coverage of it that I could find

http://www.com-unik.info/shutterstock-inc-sstk-issues-earnings-results/

I didn't get anything from them, but I did take a quick look at their site. I find the over-the-top style of wording in that letter pretty off putting and the site has the same feel, but the real area of concern is the licensing.

So they appear to be trying to do single use licenses - $4 for and illustration and $29 for a logo. That means that someone has to enforce that and I can' imagine a new site paying out 90% of what they take in has the resources to do that. Which means that you may very well be effectively selling RF for those prices which seems very low.

In theory, with the "logo" license you have to modify it in some way and then use it for one client. To modify it again for another client you must buy another license. The sales aren't exclusive so I'm not sure how that works in practice - you'll see the same graphic showing up for multiple companies.

One "design" I looked at was a JPEG file (no layers) with a vignetted scene of a beach car and palm tree with the word "Summertime" on the black area at the bottom. Honestly anyone would have been better off with the photo.

There doesn't appear to be much content there, and everyone I looked at was VIP. 90% of zero is....

Their defense is crazy....

So there's a big difference between work that is so old that it's out of copyright and where the agency which has purchased prints or negatives takes the time to scan the works and make them available to prospective buyers. The image is out of copyright, but without someone making it available, that work wouldn't be used by anyone.

Then you have a collection of works given to the nation to be used by anyone at no charge. Available for download via the library of congress. How can any agency send out demand letters regarding any of these images? They can't know where the image came from as there are other legitimate ways the users could have obtained it.

Even if you forgive the scummy practice of changing your customers for images they could use for free (read the lawsuit), Getty's demand letters regarding these images can't be valid. I guess this racket is lucrative and enough people pay up (even something) to make it worth giving it a go.

So Getty did no work to justify collecting anything from anyone - one can't even talk about them sharing the collections from the demand letters with the photographer as I assume they pocket the lot?

Except it all looks different as if this week but it's all there somewhere!  The montage total is now front and center on your stats page (click More on the bobbin right of any web pah

It isn't just Payoneer that charges fees for USD transactions that occur across borders.

I encountered this larceny when on vacation in a country outside the US which uses the US dollar as its currency (Turks & Caicos). After returning I saw conversion fees and complained to the credit card company. They explained their rules; I said I'd never have used the card if I'd thought for even a second they'd charge me a currency fee for buying in the national currency of US dollars. They agreed to refund the fee as a goodwill gesture, which was better than nothing.

In reading about this afterwards, it appears that lots of folks hoping to avoid high fees and shops hoping to encourage shopping were doing a conversion into a USD price and then charging it to the US credit card. The credit card companies didn't want to lose their totally bogus currency conversion fee (a computer needs to make a calculation; at worst this should be a few cents per transaction for the expense of keeping currency data up to date) so they invented this even more insane rule about transactions in foreign countries regardless of currency.

These fees are total ripoffs, but they're widespread, not just Payoneer

For completeness, here's the exact text on the Getty Images Contributor Community Forum page (after some blah blah about creating a vibrant professional community)

"Please Remember: All Information posted on the Contributor Website, including forum discussions, is confidential and may not be disclosed without Getty Images' prior written consent.

Let's preserve our ability to have an open dialogue. Thank You."

I think, if one were being lawyerly about it, disclosing that you were not allowed to disclose is itself a violation, but...

I never look at the map (I see it, but don't pay any attention), but just now I loaded the page and watched. I saw pictures of files that had sold this morning, and then a pause and a few more loaded. One stood out as it's a very old image and I don't recall seeing it in recent sales.

So I went and looked through the last week and a half of sales and nothing for that image. I'd have guessed it was a glitch in the map software rather than unreported sales, but it isn't just you if that's any consolation

On alamy, Carol Highsmith's photos are for sale and marked as � Everett Collection Inc / Alamy Stock Photo
They have 757K images but only a portion. I couldn't find the grass with the shuttlecock image shown in the peta pixel article - possibly they've taken it down? The Everett Collection is entertainment and "historical" images.

I hope she makes these folks take their images down as well. Why should they profiit from her gift?

http://pdnpulse.pdnonline.com/2016/07/photographer-seeking-1-billion-getty-images-copyright-infringement.html

Apparently the new view doesn't show the current day's sales at all. Yesterday, I could look at the old list and see the sales getting added but nothing showed up in the new view (no sales for that day). Today, I see yesterday's sales, but nothing for today (and there are some as I can see via the old page.

I understand that this looks prettier, but it's got to improve on the accuracy front (showing actual not rounded amounts)  showing today's sales, not just showing them a day in arrears.

I thought I'd experiment again - went on a field trip to the garden to take a flower picture with my iPhone 6s - to lob a softball at the SS mobile app to see if it did better than with the bear scat.

It did



I accepted many of those offered, added Azalea and Pacific Northwest (which it recognized after typing just the first few letters, so I just had to click to accept) and submitted. It took an hour for the rejection (based on e-mail times) - Focus and "Overuse" (noise reduction or sharpening). I assume it passed the first filter

This begs the question of who on earth would want to buy an image like this. The iPhone 6s has a pretty decent camera for a smartphone, but if you look at the out of focus background trees, the "bokeh" is horrible, and almost all iPhone pictures look over-sharpened to me.

Perhaps people have had iPhone images accepted to SS, but I have to assume lots would get technical rejections just based on the limitations of the camera.

However, even if you assume for a moment the technical details of the image were perfect, does improving this workflow really make any sense? If you were going to submit a flower/plant image, the identification of the flower/plant would be key - something the app can't do.

If you were to take this technology to the web submission process, it makes no sense as you'd be mad not to imbed your keywords into the file uploaded. So it'd be nice to have a keyword suggestion feature like this in Lightroom or Photoshop or a plugin to those apps.

Assuming they do want mobile submissions, I think the biggest help is their auto-complete as you type, which appears to be using their keyword database, not just iPhone standard stuff. Automated keyword suggestions could be improved:

1. Start with fewer and add more based on what the user picks up on.

2. Add a feature to clear their guesses and "guess again" (after you've typed a few)

3. Add some hints about what else the user needs to add - if the keyword picks out a human and guesses it's female, offer to add (one of) child, girl, woman, mature woman, senior (for example). It's easy to forget things you know - city, state, country; season of the year or morning/afternoon/evening/night

And adding a "did you forget" keyword feature to the web submission would be nice - their spell check has helped me out before when I misspelled something (and as Photoshop doesn't have spell check for the metadata I didn't notice). Yes, I have to go back to Photoshop and fix the original, but it's still better than propagating the mistake.

Shutterstock updated its mobile contributor apps yesterday and added a new keywording feature

http://www.shutterstock.com/blog/shutterstocks-autotagging-feature-for-mobile-makes-tagging-a-breeze

I don't upload iPhone photos, but I was curious about the keywording help - pretty doubtful that it could really do a good job, but wanted to see.

So I did an experiment this morning uploading an iPhone  photo of bear poop in my driveway to see how the upload process went. The photo was in focus, taken in flat, bright overcast light, but was pretty unremarkable.

The keywords SS's app came up with looked as if they came from an auto-spam generator! Beautiful? Sea? Red? Travel?

I entered 15 or so keywords, submitted it and within 4 minutes, I had both the "thank you for your submission" and rejection e-mails (lighting and composition). I did attach a model release for my foot - there to provide scale - so it wasn't rejected for that



So SS has only the 7 current images of bear scat/poop/feces - there may not be much of a market for the subject matter I'm not bothered by the rejection but

(a) this was clearly fully automated - no human looked at this picture and
(b) if you aren't a native English speaker, relying on this keywording tool is risky. It clearly doesn't understand what it's looking at

I did think about uploading a flower picture - like the blog example - but couldn't imagine they'd actually approve a cell phone flower (or food) picture just because of the subject matter.

YMMV