I thinks, lots of us received an invitation to Ingimage and partners in March. Looks like it was a campain to make a better start for StockPhotoSecrets. But look at their prices!
They offer 250 Dls per week, subscription for 12 months, for $999. It's about 52 weeks in the year, so they selling 13000 images for $999. It's $0,07 per image and this is only SPS price! How much can author get? $0,01? What is it? A new DollarPhotoClub rising? The cheaper, the angrier?

I am pretty sure it's the same as with every other subscription program since their invention a decade or more ago. You'll get a subscription sale for each of those downloads. I have no idea how much those are paid for at Ingimage but if you supply them you should know.

Since I have a smartphone which makes pretty good pics, I am now searching for a stocksite who accepts these kind of images and also sells them.
I already subscribed at the most popular agencies, but I don't won't to 'pollute' my port there with images of a lesser quality.

I heard about snapwire, but also read about their time consuming upload process.

I put together a list like that last fall:
http://www.michaeljayfoto.com/agency-reviews/the-mobile-stock-experiment-continued/

I didn't get to write a summary of my experiences so far. But in short: EyeEm; and far behind Twenty20; and even further behind Fotolia Instant (though they don't accept many of my smart phone pics). All the rest: Not worth it, especially those with "shoot on specs" ("challenges", "missions", "quests" whatever they call it).

These distributors hardly make any direct sales from my experience, all they do is send files out to other 3rd parties and take a big cut. So yes you will see plenty of tiny sales. Most of these distributor agencies made most money from Corbis and Getty, now Corbis is gone and Getty is selling more for low prices.

There certainly is some truth in it, it's not just those two but in fact four partner agencies made about 75-80% in number of sales volume for me. However, the other 20-25% typically are bigger sales and they come from agencies that I would never have access to, some names of Australian, Swedish, Chinese or Korean agencies popped up that I've never heard of but also collections like Fotolia Infinite or Shutterstock Premier. So while the number of sales is low, their share in the revenue is rather big in my personal experience.

People are doing less better in Moment but a few are reporting good sales each month. Try and join westend. Test them out.

Well, there is the problem with distribution agencies. You can't just "test them out". If you think, you can just fill out an online form, submit a handful of images and see what happens, you will be disappointed. It takes a long time (12-18 months) and some consistent submissions to get any meaningful results. The distributions takes its time and the reporting of sales back from all over the world takes time as well. Also it's not like the microstocks: Either your new images sell or they get ranked back in the search a week or two later. You will naturally get some quicker sales (which can still be 4-6 months) but those are likely to be only smaller ones. The bigger sales take even more time because there is most likely a designer agency plus a customer involved before things go into print while a typical web use is something the editor decides right away.

So if you just "try" to upload 20 images in a first submission and then wait to see what happens, you will get disappointed. There is no way this way of thinking could work out with a distribution agency.

Thank you Michael!

Can I ask you a couple of questions before buying that nice app? Is there some kind of universal release or the app makes several different ones for different sites? How does model sign that release technically on a mobile device? There must be some kind of electronically generated sign, right?

It's a universal release and I have no problems getting them accepted at any agency. They are explicitly on the list of accepted releases on Shutterstock (http://www.shutterstock.com/blog/acceptable-foreign-language-releases) and iStock (http://www.istockphoto.com/article_view.php?ID=1418). It generates a PDF and a JPG which you send to either yourself or the model or the both of you through email, so the model can also always get a copy easily.

The release is signed on the device screen. You can sign with the finger but I usually take a stylus pen to my shootings to make it feel more natural for the models.

An additional charme is that you just shoot the "reference image" on the device, so you have additional security.

It's so much easier than doing all of this on paper and scanning/photographing the releases with a camera. The money it costs is earned back so easily with the saved time.

Seeing that many of the agents accept Editorial Images, i thought i would test the System out to see what happens.

There seems to be some confusion about the difference between "editorial stock" and "news relevant images". When it comes to the regular stock agencies like Shutterstock or iStock, you will figure out that sometimes they approve images within a few hours, at other times it takes two or three days. Their processes are not meant to be used for newsworthy images.

Editorial in this context means images that are relevant to a more generic topic and used over the course of many years but can not be distributed as commercial stock images due to legal restrictions. For example, people standing in front of famous sights somewhere or images containing copyright protected architecture.

News relevant images need fast processing and need to be distributed quickly as they are being used almost live these days (or at the latest the very next day). Alamy is (to my knowledge) the only agency allowing submission to a news-oriented distribution channel through their site and app.

However, I doubt that any kind of local event will be suitable for any international agency. In most cases, only local/regional media will report on that kind of events. You are far better off offering those images to the local media directly.

So the first image (DSC05035) got a interpolation artifacts and compression artefacts reason. The second and third image (DSC06342 & DSC04525) got a compression artefacts reason. The last image (DSC05062) got a interpolation artifacts reason. I want to learn from my mistakes and create great photos, so I hope everyone can help me out.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/137754526@N08/albums/72157668285591172

These are some of my questions about the said photos.

 I�m not very good at understanding technology but I was under the impression that compression meant that your file has been shrunk down for size. All of my files go straight from the camera into Lightroom, so I don�t understand how my images were "compressed". The second critique, interpolation artifacts, is something I just don�t understand in general. What I mean when I say that is when I looked in the QC failure reasons I don�t understand what it is trying to tell to me, so I don�t know what I did wrong. Is there a better example someone could give for this?

If we are talking about artefacts, those are most likely only showing in the 100% resolution of the images. So there is not much use at looking at a downscaled version on Flickr to give specific help. So maybe consider posting a 100% resolution somewhere (with a watermark in the center or something...) and give a link again.

However, in general, landscapes are not known to sell really well. The images may look beautiful but it's not really what agencies are looking for. With the exception of the fox in the tree, your images don't look like they have high sales potential, so reviewers are very likely to look much more closely to this kind of images than they would at a people shot with a good concept. So I would really consider other subject matter when applying to any agency these days.

On the technical side I do see what I think is heavy purple fringing in the fox image (where the branches are going through some bright sky). And in image number 4 it looks a bit like you couldn't make up your mind - it has some motion blur but it's not really a long exposure. This might not be ideal as well.

thought to give them another chance
...
I'm done there

I am sure they will be crying in bed tonight for having wasted the last chance you have given them.

Forgive me if this has been covered before...$40 for 10 images, with a subscription that can be rolled over if unused? So $4 per image. Was this the deal contributors complained about, so iS decided to give us our percentage royalty rather than a subscription royalty? I can't remember.

Also, at the bottom of the page it says buyers will lose the right to roll images over if they don't auto-renew their subscription. So iS keeps the $40/month whether people buy anything or not? In that scenario iS gets $40, we get nothing, buyer gets nothing.

http://www.istockphoto.com/plans-and-pricing

Yes, that was announced in October: http://www.microstockgroup.com/istockphoto-com/stockgetty-offering-higher-commissions-on-new-sub-packs/

And yes, when subscription customers don't use their download, the agency gets to keep the money and no contributor is being paid. It's the same as everywhere.

Quote from: MichaelJayFoto on April 14, 2016, 05:47

Quote from: AlexAndor on April 14, 2016, 01:47

What about this Premium Collection? The way I see it I now have to upload my images to EyeEm first, see if they get picked as exclusive for the Premium Collection, upload elsewhere if not picked.
Did I understand correctly?

I wouldn't really "wait" for it. Getty is really slow in selecting images for their premium collections, it might take months, they even might decide next year to select one of your older images. And the percentage of images selected for this is likely to be very small, like one in a thousand or so. It's not the same as the "EyeEm x Getty" collection was in the past when you got feedback within a week or two.

So when your image gets picked, you can still decide if you want to take the effort to remove it from other agencies. Obviously that would be harder to do if you submit the same images to 20 agencies. But then again I have my doubts if the typical non-exclusive microstock imagery is what Getty is going to choose for their premium collection.

Thank you for your answer. I'm not really up to date with Getty's collections and ways of doing things.

Coincidence or not, I just got an email saying that a few of my images have been selected for the premium collection. Lucky I didn't upload them somewhere else.

Yes, I got the same email. As part of the new arrangement, apparently they went through all the existing uploads to define which pictures go to that premium collection right aways. However, these are all "old" images. I can't be sure how quick they are going to be in the future, it's just my personal expectation that it won't be decided within two or three weeks. But maybe I'm wrong and they will speed up the whole process.

I guess because we will be competing with ourselves on Alamy, having the same images on Eyeem and Alamy.

Obviously. But as I mentioned, many around here are already competing with themselves, offering the same images in $100+ collections they also offer for $0.25 subscriptions. Sure it would be better to get $20 from a sale but then again getting $10 from it is still better than the $0.25

And Alamy has some 60, 70 million images. Sure there are some very small niches where there is a certain chance that the same client will see your image twice. But in most cases your images will rank rather differently being in two different collections submitted at two different points in time. So I guess it's also doubling the chance to get your images seen in many cases.

Well, each to their own. There is no obligation to upload your images everywhere.

And as I understand it, that now means automatic distribution of images to Getty and Alamy. So for anyone already with Alamy that might be problematic.

Why? How?

I have always archived my RAW files as well as my uploaded JPEGS to a few hard drives. But I have been thinking if I really need to keep both since I cannot recall using my RAW files for anything after uploading as JPEGS.

I archived my images since I started taking pictures in 1999. Unfortunately it took a few years for me to 1) buy a camera that allows shooting in RAW and 2) actually shooting RAW.

I learned a lot about post processing in those years, so I have quite a few images that I processed years after a shot them because I never found them worth uploading before I knew how to process them. Also, I have a few images that I processed more than once, sometimes with two or three very different results at the end.

So not storing your RAW files and keeping them for easy access is throwing away money in my opinion.

We contributors should set up our own stocksite where the royalty rates are something like 90%. 10% is only for the runing company and the website. And we need webtool for the copy and paste all the photos and keywords from the iStock if contributor wants to leave from the iStock.

Sure. Because customers are just waiting for that. And the site obviously is going to run flawless once set up because it is run by photographers who know what they're doing.