Quote from: lagereek on May 12, 2011, 06:49
Yeah well I DO get the pop-up link but then theres an internal server link error, sigh!  would be nice to just shuffle over approx  2000 shots from Shutterstock, for me time is the essence and I simply cant fint the time to manually get them all over to BS.

I'm pretty much in the same boat (except without an offer to join).  I have 2500 photos on SS, and 0 on BigStock, and I can't find any motivation to upload them myself, but I would be happy to join the program.

One of the more interesting things I've noticed at Shutterstock is that the 'On Demand' downloads have picked up quite a bit, which is part of the reason SS is bringing in twice as much for me now than any of the other agencies.

Edit:

I had asked about something here previously, but found it already.

Hmm, so my account was opted in, but on the file edit page for that file, it was *not* opted in, which should be correct, as I went into the Partner Program setup in the settings and used the 'All Off' portfolio before I removed my port.

I went back into My Uploads and switched to Deactivated files, sorted by date.  Turns out they sold a file on February 28th, 1011 that I had deactivated at iStock on October 10th, 2010...

Um...

So when I pulled my port from iStock, I left a single file:  http://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup.php?id=11367333

In the file's download details it shows a single download on March 16th for 0.14 (xSmall Regular), this is the only download for this file listed.  My Uploads agrees with this, there is only one file with one download, as do the stats page. 

However, the stats pages also show a single download for February 28th (in blue, so it must have been a file purchase, right?) for 0.08.  This does not show up anywhere else on the site and my account balance actually is 0.22. 

Any ideas on the phantom, unrecorded download?  Did I miss any news about accounting issues at iStock?

The thing is, they run the contributors site off a subdomain, if they are trying to protect from image theft, they should mostly be concerned with keeping the customers legitimate.  I think they captcha the contributor site to keep users and stats engines from spidering the stats pages and increasing the server load.  Its about the only thing that makes sense from a contributor standpoint.

Also, you can bypass the whole login thing to collect your stats automatically by hijacking the cookie locally once you are logged in

Sorry michealo, that was meant to be a play on words, rather than a discussion of hosting infrastructure.

Quote from: michealo on March 07, 2011, 13:18
If you compare IS versus Shutterstock on netcraft.com

I like that netcraft says IS is in the Netherlands.

Quote from: aeonf on March 07, 2011, 14:04
For the 10'th time, please ignore those silly sites. They mean nothing what-so-ever.  Any attempt to conclude statistical data from such sites is bound to be WRONG!

If these sites were so irrelevant, why would Amazon buy Alexa?  I'll grant your point that the sample data may not be random enough, but it never will be.  What we see is that there is a large group of people whose behavior is shifting, whether or not they are representative of the whole sounds like it will be a IS vs. SS religious debate.

I just had a batch go through with only a couple of rejects.

If people weren't still complaining about having trouble with the image search on iStock, you could make the case that they made their website more efficient:

It has if you look at the unique visitor version of the chart

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/istockphoto.com+shutterstock.com+dreamstime.com/?metric=sess&months=6

This only goes to January, who wants to take bets that Shutterstock passed iStock in February?

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/istockphoto.com+shutterstock.com+dreamstime.com/?metric=sess&months=6

I have Submitted, Accepted and Rejected folders for each agency (i.e. 'DT Accepted', etc).  I also have an Upload Queue folder where I put JPEGs that are ready to go, with EXIF, etc.  I FTP files to all the sites, so I open multiple FileZilla windows (one for each site), drag and drop everything from the Upload Queue folder into each window.  FileZilla will automatically throttle everything, so it uploads two images at a time in each window to each site (all customizable).  While the files are uploading, I select everything in Upload Queue again, right-click and choose 'Create Shortcut'.  The shortcuts will automatically be selected when they are created, so I just drag them to one of the Submitted folders, then repeat for each site.   When the uploads finish, I then copy everything in the Upload Queue folder and move them to a JPEG folder.  As sites accept/reject the files, I just move the shortcut to the appropriate folder, and the OS will figure out how to make the shortcuts point to the correct place.  It only takes me a few minutes to get uploads started to all the sites, its actually pretty quick once you are used to the workflow.

I keep all of these site folders in a folder for the current year, which is handy when trying to look for a particular image. 

http://google.com/#q=site:fotolia.com+azurelaroux

Drat, so you are saying I shouldn't spend my Saturday writing a fun client/server distributed network project, Elena?

So basically, this would be a distributed storage and indexing problem.  You need a method for the common metadata database located at the portal site to be updated (daily polling for changes?), and the easiest way to do that would be to have a commonly installed software package on each site that handles indexing and storage of files (on that person's website).  

You want this to be as simple as possible, photographer uploads new files to a directory on their server and the software handles the rest.  I guess you would need a local mini-page to mark which images have model releases and which do not (is there a model release flag in EXIF?).

Software would extract keywords, create a unique identifier for the file, create an XML descriptor file, create a thumbnail file, and then move the files to a storage directory structure.

Portal server would poll site once a day for new XML files, and update its local common database, and possibly import a thumbnail image (might be better to serve it from the photographer's site).

The portal server's search engine would handle all the search complexities, and have minimal storage and bandwidth requirements (distributed!), keeping costs very, very low.

For actual final sales, portal server would redirect to the software on the photographer's server, which would deal with payment (paypal?) and delivery of the full sized image file.


I like Graphic Leftover's one-size-fits-all pricing approach, makes things much simpler and requires less storage on the Photographer's servers, but wouldn't be difficult to resize the images as uploads were being processed.


This would also make it easy for anyone with a web server to participate, even if they don't have their own storefront.

One obvious piece that has been overlooked so far is licensing terms.  If we leave it up to each individual person, then terms would be all over the map.  I think uniting everyone under common license would be one of the first tasks.  Kind of like the GPL, in that it's a publically available set of terms that everyone can use, but in this case governing reasonable usage of images.

Quote from: yuliang11 on January 20, 2011, 12:33
anyone dares to delete from fotolia?

I might talk to Pat Lor about it first, but squeezing the littlest guys does not sit well with me.

Also, I think its worth noting that the "from $0.95 per credit" now only applies to credit packages of 20,000.  The 10,000 credit package price went up to $1/credit:


12     $1.54
26     $1.52
50     $1.50
120    $1.46
300    $1.40 to $1.43 (+2.1%)
600    $1.33
1000   $1.20 to $1.25 (+4.2%)
2000   $1.10 to $1.13 (+2.7%)
5000   $1.00 to $1.05 (+5%)
10000  $0.95 to $1.00 (+5.3%)
20000  NEW at $0.95 (buy twice as much to get the same discount)


I'll put this here too, its from the other thread:

Quote from: dgilder on January 19, 2011, 17:26
E+ price changes (based on KelvinJay's post and link):

Code Select Expand


M    15 to 20 (33% increase)
L    20 to 30 (50%)
XL   25 to 35 (40%)
XXL  30 to 40 (33%)
XXXL 35 to 50 (43%)


Wow.  Bet they finally give the E+ files the Best Match boost they had promised at the start of the program.

Quote from: dgilder on January 19, 2011, 18:11
The minimum prices for images on Dreamstime:

Code Select Expand


ES   1
S    3
M    4
L    5
XL   6
XXL+ 7


The maximum prices for very popular images on Dreamstime:

Code Select Expand


ES   9
S    11
M    14
L    15
XL   16
XXL+ 17


So the largest size of the most popular image on Dreamstime is 3 *credits* cheaper than the Medium E+ file from iStock.  The credits on Dreamstime are also significantly cheaper (10-15%?). 

The minimum prices for images on Dreamstime:

ES   1
S    3
M    4
L    5
XL   6
XXL+ 7


The maximum prices for very popular images on Dreamstime:

ES   9
S    11
M    14
L    15
XL   16
XXL+ 17


So the largest size of the most popular image on Dreamstime is 3 *credits* cheaper than the Medium E+ file from iStock.  The credits on Dreamstime are also significantly cheaper (10-15%?). 

E+ price changes (based on KelvinJay's post and link):

M    15 to 20 (33% increase)
L    20 to 30 (50%)
XL   25 to 35 (40%)
XXL  30 to 40 (33%)
XXXL 35 to 50 (43%)


Wow.  Bet they finally give the E+ files the Best Match boost they had promised at the start of the program.

They probably will now that IS has bumped all the E+ Medium and above prices from 5 to 15 credits and raised the credit package prices 3-5 cents/credit.

Looks that way.  Whee, $5 blog pricing for Vetta!

I think he was referring to the normal email you get saying "Hey, we got your request and it will be processed, yadda, yadda, yadda"