How will Adobe and Shutterstock react?

The historical stuff is a great collection, but in terms of day-to-day earnings, I'm betting it's not that big a deal. SS had been pursuing Getty's corporate clients for a while, and I don't think this will make any difference to that.

Adobe is so far behind both Getty and SS that their card is the integration with CC, which I'm guessing won't pan out to be a game changer for them. So they have 45 million images and can't really compete with either Getty or SS before the Corbis acquisition.

So SS will make a lot more under this setup, so yes, it's a paycut.

The three EL plans published are 2 for $199, 5 for $449 and 25 for $1,699

That works out to $99.50, $89.80 or $67.96 each for the buyer

At 30%, what I will now make is $29.85, $26.94 or $20.38

At the lowest tier, 20%, they will pay out $19.90, $17.98 or $13.59

If there are custom deals for even lower prices, then the paycut just gets bigger

BTW, I don't yet have this e-mail from them...

One more slightly disturbing detail from the discussion on the blog about the revised license terms:

"For Physical goods, it will really depend on how it is people choose to sell their products. If a person sells their invites one at a time they would only be able to sell 500 invites. However, if they sell a pack of invitations and 500 invitations come in one pack, they could sell the pack 500 times (because the �pack of invites� is what they consider their product). For Digital goods, each sale of the good counts as one unit sold. "

This may be an unlikely scenario for a creative market customer, but saying that you could offer many times the number of items by bundling differently seems even worse from the contributor's point of view - more money made by the buyer of art, shortchanging the contributor even more severely.

It just seems that the meaning of a somewhat vague license is being made up as the questions come in - which was one of the things they said they wanted to fix in revising the license. Previously there was an exceedingly vague license and answered questions in the FAQ detailing what was OK and not OK.

I could have lived with 5 or 10 products for sale as part of the standard license (to allow someone to try out a product idea for no extra outlay but then buy the extended license if it actually worked and started selling). But 500 is just way, way too many.

Someone suggested personal, standard and extended licenses so the no products option could be a different license, and I'd be fine with that too. Then I'd offer the first two and opt out of extended (with the unlimited products), or possibly price it ridiculously high

I don't know how long this feature has been there, but I just noticed that iStock no longer has the zoom in and scroll around previews. They've gone to enlarged watermarked previews similar to DT, SS and 123rf.

iStock's are 1235 on the long edge and don't have any visible iD info (such as image number and the site). They also don't seem to have learned from SS's mistakes about including something other than white in the watermark. Strangely, iStock vectors have a different watermark from photos.

Here are links to the previews for iStock, SS and DT for the same photo as a comparison

http://i.istockimg.com/image-zoom/22795801/3/380/253/stock-photo-22795801-senior-couple-with-camera-on-beach.jpg
http://image.shutterstock.com/z/stock-photo-senior-couple-with-camera-on-beach-121062712.jpg
http://www.dreamstime.com/comp.php?imageid=27959586&type=1

Here's an iStock vector watermark

http://i.istockimg.com/image-zoom/64184947/3/380/380/stock-illustration-64184947-elderly-couple-at-the-beach.jpg

In terms of size, SS is still the largest at 1500 px on the long edge, then DT and 123rf at 1300 and IS at 1235. AdobeStock brings up the rear at 1,000 px

Perhaps people want to look at their images to see how well the watermark protects them. Not clear if there'd be any response if improvements were asked for, but it's worth a shot for those who have a large portfolio there.

After someone told me the previews had been around a while, I realized that in Classic View (which I almost always use) you have the zoom-and-scroll, but in the new view, it's the large watermarked preview. Didn't someone say classic is going away?

I hadn't looked in a while, but was on the buyer side of the site today and noticed that SS now has 73,202,710 images. Clearly they're not slowing down in accepting new work, although you probably have an edge if you mass produce near identical icons or marijuana overlaid with text photos

I then thought I'd see what the one year growth was, 20 Jan 2015 to 2016 and it was 25,462,924! That's more than the total collection was on 20 Jan 2013 (23,584,487)

Intrigued, I looked at how many images were uploaded in the last month (20 Dec 2015 to 20 Jan 2016) - 2,637,712

Same month last year (20 Dec 2014 to 20 Jan 2015) - 1,321,682

That is an increase of 99% - just about double in other words

Compare the prior year's collection growth (20 Jan 2014 to 2015) and it was 14,949,278, meaning 2015 uploads increased 70% over 2014 uploads

Go back one more year and the numbers are 9,206,021 and 62%

Who knows if the monthly growth Dec to Jan will play out for the whole of 2016, but if it did, the collection on 20 Jan 2017 would be 145,673,393

Given the size of these numbers, it just about has to be factory output in large volume with some odds and ends of more individual stuff tucked away in the nooks and crannies. Possibly a great search will save the buyers from seeing the dreck, but then what really is the point of these numbers?

It has to be to some finance person who knows nothing about buyers or sellers of stock images/illustrations/video/audio...

I can access it and do a search without a problem (Western USA). I still see a link to Thinkstock on Getty mothership site

Why do you think this would be any different from any web banner usage of a licensed photo?

If it's a photo of a model claiming to be someone you know they're not, then that would be a problem and you could report it to Facebook (which has a policy of people using their real names).

1. Is it worth it to be exclusive? I have read a few posts but times seem to be always changing on MS. I will spend approx. 15-20 hours a week shooting/uploading stock. As of yet this will not be a full time thing but if the money is there, I would dedicate more time on it.


Artist exclusive - no. Once upon a time iStock was successful enough and the royalties high enough to make that make sense, but that time is long gone. Image exclusivity is available for a few agencies and that can make sense if there are some images that happen to sell better at that agency than elsewhere. Don't start out with exclusive images until you figure out what does well where. If you have some truly unique imagery, then probably RM licensing though a traditional agency is a better bet (and don't license anything RF if you're even thinking about RM)

2. Is it worth spending time on isolates?


Not on tomatoes, peppers, lemon slices and so on. If you have some really original work, having a quality isolation can be a big asset, so it's good to be able to do this competently.

3. Do images with people involved sell better?

That depends on the people and the images - you can't generalize. Some categories of images have a larger market - teams of workers, office scenes, etc. - but that also means much more competition. If you have access to unique situations and can get releases, you might do well with a niche that is under served. But if there is low demand for that type of imagery, your sales will be limited. Portraits of people looking at the camera - versus doing something or engaging with others - are not suited to stock.

4. I have a load of travel, nature and food photography from personal interest..will these sort of images sell on Microstock?

Some might do OK, but all those shots of generic sea with generic sunset will probably not. If the image doesn't tell a story or has no specific location (and a location lots of people go to) then it's low demand with masses of competition. I found that website very hard to use - slide shows that I can't control the timing of with no set of thumbnails are infuriating. The food in your shots (until I got impatient and gave up) looked yummy and drool-worthy, which is a very good start. Food is highly competitive as a stock category though.

5. And last but not least, once I upload and keyword my images, do I just set it and forget it? Or is there continuous maintenance involved? IE. Will I be able to catch any sales without marketing the images (myself)?


The agencies have the buyer traffic which is why we fork over so much of the license fee to them. Shutterstock in particular. You don't need to market yourself to get sales. If you choose to sell through sites like Fine Art America (prints), you probably should expect to do more leg work.

Good luck

I can get nikon d3300 or t5i (700d) canon.
I heard nikon got a little better IQ because of the big sensor and resolution but the canon got more tools like AE Bracketing and bigger buffer that make it kinda more proffesional i think.
Video is not interest me, i buy the camera for stills ONLY so all the advantages that reffer to video isnt important to me.

Sent from my GT-I9500 using Tapatalk

I think you need to consider things more broadly than just the camera. Lenses is the biggie. But there's also having budget left over for lighting (Speedlight and something to get it off camera; a reflector)

Do you have any idea what sorts of things you will want to shoot? Studio vs. landscape/sports/wildlife and so on?

Whatever your budget is, making sure you can get the best lens you can afford for the type of shooting you plan to do is very important. Both Canon and Nikon make great gear, but you might find one or the other has an ideal lens for your intended uses and that, not some laundry list of seldom used features on the camera, will be your deciding factor.

It's all about the light - the glass, the sensor, the things that provide or shape light. Work back from there with your budget in mind and only if you have a dead heat with everything else look at features like AE bracketing. I'd pay no attention to the 18 vs. 24 MP. They're both plenty good enough.

Good luck with your decision

Relevant section from 2:50 - 3:55.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_t_wB7t5Yo

That's a link to a comedy show?

Amusingly, this user's name is popular.vector! There are 64,723 items in their portfolio and it's about 100 or so objects presented in endless variations of box color & shape, background color & shape. It's mind-numblngly boring repetition of super-simple objects, each one to a file. Does that mean the trend on SS of ever-increasing collections of icons in one file is pass�?

http://www.shutterstock.com/portfolio/search.mhtml?gallery_landing=1&gallery_id=2939971&page=1&safesearch=1&sort_method=newest

About the only good thing I can think of is that the keywords are pretty close (so there are a few misplaced words like computer on an icon of an eye dropper, but they're mostly OK)