I tried to upload some pictures to Eyeem from my computer and it seems like their web upload form does not import IPTC metadata from uploaded files. Am I doing something wrong? Am I really supposed to keyword all my files manually?

It also seems they do not have ftp upload, is it true?

Quote from: sharpshot on March 01, 2016, 10:46
Sold my first mobile phone photo for $2.  Used a few sites but had no luck in over 6 months, so I will have to upload a lot more images.
https://www.twenty20.com/photos/3fe1283f-f225-42dc-96cb-b0721c630372

Congratulations! Is it possible / makes sense to upload DSLR pictures to Twenty20? Will they sell?

Quote from: YadaYadaYada on March 27, 2016, 16:18

Quote from: dirkr on March 24, 2016, 14:09
Why do you guys keep uploading anyway? They pay less than Shutterstock, but it's the same company. Once they did that I stopped uploading.

Same for me except instead of competing with myself for the same photos at 25c each, I closed BS removed all. There's no reason for BS to exist. Buyers would find the same on SS and we get paid more. Unless you want the $10 video collection or like being paid 25c a download. I can't support BS any more.

Well, I actually do not think my images on BS compete with my images on SS, at least directly. I have very similar ports on both and I have a lot of SS downloads of images which I have on BS as well. If what you are saying about self competition is true, I should see my sales "migrating" from SS to BS (cheaper for customer?), but that is not the case. This is why I believe it still makes sense to upload to BS even if we already contribute to SS. At least until SS decide to completely merge two agencies / libraries (if it is ever going to happen). 

Quote from: dirkr on March 24, 2016, 14:09
Why do you guys keep uploading anyway? They pay less than Shutterstock, but it's the same company. Once they did that I stopped uploading.

When I just started both SS and BS paid the same royalties - 25 cents per image, so it didn't matter back then. Now, when I got to higher tiers on SS, it pays more, but I still upload to BS, because I noticed, that they sell somewhat different images from my port as compared to SS. So for me they do not overlap completely and it still makes sense to upload there in my opinion.

Do Videoblock accept editorial video? I could not find any checkbox to click that the video is editorial during the submission process.

Quote from: MircoV on March 23, 2016, 13:46
Try this:
1. Create also decent port with variation that is not on micro (around 3k images)
2. Upload and keyword them according Alamy guidelines
3. Then sit back have some patience and sales will slowly thick in and after time become regular. Dont quit in between.

Why not to put pictures which are on micro (red part)? Is it because buyer will check the price on SS or others and buy it there for cheaper?

Quote from: microstockinsider on March 19, 2016, 23:55

Quote from: Andrey Popov on March 18, 2016, 19:43
Since last week Bigstock randomly unable to read Metadata for approx 20% of all photos uploaded through FTP. All those photos are processed without problem on all other stock sites. I have to manually copy and paste descriptions and keywords for each photo. Big waste of time. Does anyone else have the same problem?

ditto on this for me too, can't see any pattern in the affected images, happened for me in the last two batches in approx the past 10 days, 20-30% maybe?

I am also having the same issue with some of my images imported incorrectly after ftp upload (IPTC metadata was not read correctly). Do you guys found any way to fix it? I could write to support, but it takes ages for them to respond

Quote from: MartinD on March 22, 2016, 12:20
@PhotoDude

Getty invited me via my Vimeo account. They saw my movies:
https://vimeo.com/martindeja

Unfortunately they stopped inviting via Vimeo.

Here you can submit samples of your work:
https://contributors.gettyimages.com/article_public.aspx?article_id=2367

Thank you Martin!

Quote from: MartinD on March 22, 2016, 01:28
It was really worth the wait!

This still was sold for $4850!!!

Congratulations Martin! Please tell us, how to become Getty contributor? I think they are very picky when it comes to whom to invite to become a contributor. Any points?

Quote from: PixelBytes on March 19, 2016, 06:55

Quote from: PhotoDude on March 19, 2016, 06:48
I am trying to find how to fill out W9 form for Alamy. Cannot find it anywhere in the Account Settings. Is it because they are British agency and do not need it? Do they send 1099-MISC to US contributors?

I never got one from them.  I just report the income as other income, along with the other few sites that don't send 1099.

Thank you PixelBytes, I guess that is what I will do too. I think it is because they are British agency and understandably do not bother to comply with foreign (US) tax rules.

I am trying to find how to fill out W9 form for Alamy. Cannot find it anywhere in the Account Settings. Is it because they are British agency and do not need it? Do they send 1099-MISC to US contributors?

Quote from: trek on December 30, 2015, 20:35
I am extremely uncomfortable with their plan to 1099 us for their commissions.  My tax guy will likely twirl in his chair if a 1099 for money I never received arrives.  I am seriously considering removing my material.  I hope they fix the situation.

Guys, do you know if the same problem (Envato issuing 1099-MISC to us including THEIR commission) applies to VideoHive as well? My understanding is that Envato & VideoHive are sister companies, right? Do I guess right that VideoHive would be doing the same trick with theirs 1099-MISC to us? 

Quote from: Microstockphoto on March 07, 2016, 23:16
but with 750 photos on ss you can make 1800 dollar per month, you just need access to a lot of nude models

Are you serious? I think even tomatoes sell better than nude models on SS. Who would buys that stuff there?

Quote from: theendup on March 06, 2016, 23:31
hello,

A month a go i sent 10 of photos taken by iphone to gettyimages and they invited me to istock. The story starts there

I don't consider myself as a photographer. I am a graphic designer and i believe i have a good eye on photography. So i wanted to try the stock agencies to have my photos used by people around the world and make some extra cash. When i got an invitation for istock, I tried my chances for shutterstock, fotolia, dreamstime and 123 rf.. All accepted.. Mostly iPhone photos

I have around 150 photos and graphic design works at my portfolio at the moment. ı know that is really little comparison to most of yours

Even if i have a full time job that i love and uploading, key-wording take really good amount of time, i decided to keep doing this. I even getting my first dslr this week. Technically there is no chance to go further with iPhone Sorry apple..

So my question is what road you guys think i should take?. I don t want to take another picture of million ones already there.. I really love street and nature photography. Do editorial pictures work in stock photography world? If so i would really take my chance there. What do you think What part of nature photography is less taken?

I would really appreciate your thoughts..

Thanks in advance

I started in stock with similar attitude and more or less similar genre of photography, so maybe I can tell you what I think after doing it for some time. It is often hard to predict what is going to sell, especially in the beginning. Sometimes I see my sales and start wondering for what reason people bought that particular image of mine. You would be surprised what kind of stuff people buy sometimes, that is why I am uploading all my pictures almost indiscriminately now. You simply never know. However, after doing it for some time, I can now roughly estimate the chances of a particular image to become a good seller. There are only few which become your regular sellers and in my experience, about 70-80% of your earnings will come from that relatively small pool (10-20%) of images (Have you ever heard about 80-20 law?). The rest will sell occasionally, sometimes months after upload. I think if you want to continue doing it as a (serious) hobby, just upload whatever pictures you are taking for your own pleasure and see where you are heading with the sales and what kind of your images people buy the most. After you have at least 1000 images online you will start seeing trends. Each photographer is unique, my bestsellers can be quite different from yours because of difference in style/genre. Nature, street and general travel photography (including editorials) sell okay but it is pretty saturated market, so you have to either supply technically good images with vibrant colors, interesting angle, composition or find some locations/subjects which are not covered sufficiently yet (that is hard with SS being 70+ millions pics). It is still possible though. It was quite a pleasure to see some of my images to climb to 1-2-3 place in their respective keyword search, especially considering I started pretty recently already competing against millions of previous images, many of which are brilliant. Also, different agencies sell different stuff. Most of my bestsellers sell well across all agencies, but I still see some differences in what people buy there. You have to try them for yourself.       

It is not really selling direct, but I thought you might find it interesting:

http://fineartamerica.com/newsletters/retail-website-partners.html

Quote from: jamesbenet on March 03, 2016, 20:26
I got an answer back:

Thank you for contacting us.

Your Tax Centre page does not have the 1099 Tax statement as you did not incur any withholding tax.

We hope this clarifies.
______________

This is wrong, a 1099 must be issued regardless if you had money withheld or not if you reside in the US and had income.    I believe they are confused with US tax paperwork over there.  This is so frustrating! 

Hi guys, you probably did not make enough in payout with them during 2015, that is why they did not send 1099-MISC. I believe there is a limit and they are required to issue 1099-MISC only if it has more then $600 in earnings, but I am not sure about the exact amount.

Yeah, giving 1042-S to US person/company is wrong, but you can still use it for numbers and attach to your tax return with the explanation for the IRS that 123RF messed it up badly (they did it for bunch of US contributors, which really tells you how sloppy they are with these things). That is so annoying. 

Quote from: authenticcreations on March 04, 2016, 06:09
I can confirm this personal approach. While on other agencies i feel to talk to something automated Alamy is a person to me. Even the Cfo James himself is not afraid to ask for our oppinions on the forum. They have 40.000 contributors. Great job Alamy.

I am glad Alamy is doing good for you guys. How is it roughly compared to SS in terms of overall earnings?

Also, do they still have that antiquated and extremely non-contributor friendly indexing system with a lot of clicking and keyword separation?

Quote from: FrankyDM on March 01, 2016, 06:47
Thanks so much for the detailed summary. It's much appreciated!

I can work with that. I'll let you know if I need any more info.
You're all still welcome to send me some example JPGs that I can test with. I'm particularly interested to see which IPTC fields you're using, as well as variations in the formatting. (email: fdm at eazign dot be).

Thanks!

No problem Franky, glad to help It will be nice if you can implement that conversion!

Quote from: Chicago on February 29, 2016, 15:56
Hi.  I've been playing with the timelapse feature in my iphone 5 with ios9 and now i'm wondering if it's up to stock footage quality or not.   Any advice? thanks

Yes, you can upload it and they will most likely accept it if the quality is good. But if someone is going to buy it that is another question.

I am resurrecting this old thread I am curious, is anyone still working with these guys (Lori.ru)? How do they perform as compared to other (Western) agencies?

Quote from: FrankyDM on February 21, 2016, 19:23

Quote from: PhotoDude on February 20, 2016, 10:45
Franky, I actually meant just Title field from IPTC. When it is formatted like "City, State/Country - Month Day Year: Description of what is going on in the picture" it is accepted as editorial to SS and all other major agencies without much additional clicking/editing required (you would usually have to set Editorial check box/option to "Yes" though and sometimes select special category like at Dreamstime's system for example). However, DeepMeta required to manually specify that information again in picture description dialog and provide separate editorial description. I am not sure, it might actually be iStock requirement and DeepMeta is simply just following the  rules of the agency. My point was that it is redundant, time consuming and simply antique and I was wondering if there is any way to make it more streamlined. Manually picking all these dates and places again just makes it really time consuming to submit editorials to IS.   

While it's true that iStock uploads demand all those additional selections being made (country, date), it's also true that DeepMeta could auto-convert info imported from the IPTC title or description and auto-complete these selections for you.

In order to do that, I need to find out what the exact practice is. Details matter.

E.g. you've mentioned:
"City, State/Country - Month Day Year: Description of what is going on in the picture"
as well as:
"City, State/Country - Month Day Year: Title"

A few questions:
- It is the IPTC "title" field you are referring to, and not the "description" field?
- About "Month Day Year": is this "2 21 2016", "Februari 21 2016" or something else?
- If you put this info in the "title" field, then what goes in the "description" field?
- iStock has a separate "caption" field for editorial, where should that be taken from?

Just gathering some info here. I see some possibilities for better automation.
Thanks!

Hi Franky,

Sorry for the delay, it took me some time to get back to this. Okay, let me explain in more details and hopefully we can do something about it. Here is the editorial caption format (taken from IPTC Caption field) which is accepted in SS, BS, DT, DP, 123RF and possibly many others:

CITY, STATE/COUNTRY – MONTH DAY, YEAR or CIRCA MONTH YEAR: [Factual description of the image content, including what the image portrays].

(Here is link if you are interested: http://www.shutterstock.com/blog/submitting-editorial-content-part-2-documentary-editorial).

Examples:

San Francisco, CA/USA - 01 20 2016: Excited tourist eats a hamburger with mayonnaise and admires Golden Gate bridge

Paris, France - circa September 2015: Excited tourist eats a baguette with butter and admires Notre Dame cathedral


Basically, for most of the world, location would be CITY, COUNTRY whereas for USA (and likely Canada) the location would be CITY, STATE/COUNTRY.

As for the date, it can be either US date format MM DD YYYY (as variant - MM/DD/YYYY) or SS also allows to use CIRCA MONTH YEAR (example: circa September 2015) when the exact date is not known, which is quite convenient.

Is it possible to implement following algorithm in DeepMeta?

1. When the image is imported to DeepMeta, program reads its IPTC Caption field and checks if it has a format corresponding to one of the variants above. If this is true, DeepMeta sets "Editorial use only" checkbox in Image detail dialog to checked.

2. The data from IPTC Caption is parsed and day, month, year and location of the photo fields in Image detail dialog are automatically populated. If the date is in "circa MONTH YEAR" format, I guess we can set the day to "1" as I assume iStockPhoto does not allow "circa".

3. Editorial Caption field from the Image detail dialog (aka iStock's Caption field) is automatically populated based on photo's date, location and description from previously imported and parsed IPTC Caption field. However, iStock has a bit different format, so it has to be altered a little. They seem to favor this format:

CITY, STATE/COUNTRY - MONTH(Word) DAY(Number), YEAR: [Factual description of the image content, including what the image portrays].

Example:

Istanbul, Turkey - May 7, 2010: Street car makes its way alongside shoppers crowding Istiklal Avenue.

4. "Title" and "Description" fields in DeepMeta's Image detail dialog can be populated with the [Factual description of the image content, including what the image portrays] part from IPTC Caption field. I guess they can be identical.

That would really make it much easier and faster to submit editorials to iStockPhoto by simply converting images already prepared and accepted on SS and other sites.

Thanks and I hope that sounds reasonable.

I was reading SS editorial guidelines and I wonder what they mean by saying that "Images that have been taken at private and/or ticketed events, such as the events listed below, require proof of credentials before they can be accepted into our editorial collection". Then they list number of different types of events, but I am still a bit confused about them:

http://www.shutterstock.com/blog/submitting-editorial-content-part-2-documentary-editorial

What about museums, zoo, exhibitions or parks where you have to buy tickets? For example, I can buy a ticket for a museum or a zoo, go there, snap a picture of a dinosaur or some animal. Is it okay to submit it as editorial later? SS was accepting some of my shots like these before, but I am not sure if it was simply just an overlook by reviewers. After reading these guidelines, I am thinking maybe I should remove all images like that from my portfolio on SS. What do you think?   

I know, it might be different in other countries, but I am asking specifically about US.

Quote from: williamju on February 23, 2016, 01:09

Quote from: PhotoDude on February 22, 2016, 10:39

Quote from: williamju on February 21, 2016, 14:36
...
Major players in China market

    Creative: VCG(Getty distributor), Quanjing, Gaopin, DFIC, 1tu, HelloRF(ShutterStock), Fotolia, and etc.
    Editorial: VCG, DFIC, Xinhua, Quanjing, 1tu, and etc.

...

William, thank you, it is very interesting indeed! Could you tell us a bit more about Chinese stock photography market? I think many Western based contributors would be interested to know:

Is it possible for foreign photographers to contribute to Chinese agencies? I am particularly curious about "true" Chinese agencies, because I assume Chinese SS/iStock/Fotolia distributors already have our content anyway. Do you have to be Chinese national/resident? How do they handle taxes for foreign contributors? Do you have to keyword images in Chinese? Could you submit images with English keywords? What are the typical ways to get payout money, especially for foreign contributors? Can they use PayPal (or any other service available to Western photographers) with automatic CNY>USD/EUR conversion?

Some of these questions I tried to research myself, but I would really appreciate if you can tell us more. Specifically, I went to check out one of the agencies you mentioned (Quanjing). They seem to have English language, but the registration page is still in Chinese. However, they did show images of Sydney, when I entered "Sydney" in English as a keyword in the search box. That is encouraging.

I believe there are some foreign contributors working directly with local agencies, but most are via distributors, because there are many things to deal with like you mentioned above.  As most of the contributors are local Chinese, I don't think local agencies have the motivation to allocate their resources for a few foreign individuals.  But they do have staff like channel relationship for companies.  And yes, most of them can work with English, but Chinese is preferred.  International payment is not a problem, as you can see Chinese are buying all over the world and still the US government owe China a lot of debt.  We can use Paypal, Visa, WesternUnion, bank transfer, and etc., but I doubt they will do it especially for a very small portion of foreign contributors.

In other words, do you think it is impractical / challenging for individual US/EU contributor to sign up directly (not through Western representatives) with Chinese agencies?

Quote from: Microstockphoto on February 29, 2016, 08:25
every site has their own customers, if you talk cannibalization than all sites need to be considered not only BS, i still sell the same images accross all agencies, and i agree, the client will not switch agency to find an image if they dont even know it exists, they will purchase the best fit for their needs.

So I guess that would mean that it makes sense to upload SS port to BS to get more BS sales which should not negatively impact SS sales.

Quote from: Dumc on October 30, 2015, 07:34
For me, BigStock performed really well this month. More then Dreamstime and 123rf combined.

I know, it is an old topic, but I want to ask a question. The consensus above was to not upload SS portfolio to BS, because it would cannibalize sales on SS. But do you think it is really so? Let's say I have an image which sells well on both SS and BS. Do you think if I remove it from BS I will get more sales on SS? I think if image is removed from BS, a buyer will simply buy some other image from BS, because I do not think a lot of them have subscriptions on both SS and BS. What do you think guys?