Quote from: Firn on March 25, 2022, 04:35

However, my personal opinion is that microstock just doesn't earn enough to justify the extra time it would take to create different sets of keywords for the same image for every agencies, even if I fully understood how each of their algoirthms worked. I add my kewords to the metadata and that's it.

agreed.  My only difference, is once in a while i'll add all the recommended other keywords on SS, since they obviously know better than i do about their algorithm

I don't submit photos to SS anymore. But when I did, there were many recommended keywords that were irrelevant and had nothing to do with the image that I was submitting. So yea I would be extra careful about which ones I would choose from the automated suggestions made by SS.

Since no agency is really willing to share with us how exactly their search algorithm works, we can all only speculate.

Generally true. Though unless my memory is playing tricks on me, I thought I recall AS making two recommendations -  avoid using long titles and avoid using too many keywords.

I think too many keywords, of which some are less relevant to the image than others (keywords that are not relevant at all should never be used

Oh yea I only use keywords that are relevant to the image.

However, my personal opinion is that microstock just doesn't earn enough to justify the extra time it would take to create different sets of keywords for the same image for every agencies, even if I fully understood how each of their algoirthms worked. I add my kewords to the metadata and that's it.

Agreed. It's not worth the extra fuss.

There is a belief that with some stock agencies, there is such a thing as having too many keywords. After a few years of shooting stock, I still don't really know if this is really a thing or not. On DT, there are some contributors who advise against adding too many keywords as supposedly, this can hurt sales. By contrast, on SS, the general philosophy is to add as many keywords as possible. I actually mentioned on the SS forum that folks over on DT were advising against putting in lots of keywords. An SS contributor replied that this was nonsense and urged me not to listen to them. So since then, I have been adding as many keywords as possible with all the agencies that I submit to.

Though now I'm wondering if I'm doing more harm than good with certain agencies.

AS is another agency that, if I recall correctly, warns against adding excessive numbers of keywords. But unfortunately, I can't help myself.

Actually, some time ago, I did a little test on DT. I tried some searches for one or two of my images on there that had a rather large number of keywords. And I had no trouble locating those images in the search results. So I'm guessing that buyers wouldn't have any trouble either.

With Adode Stock, I'm assuming that the minimum payout amount is $100 like some other stock agencies? If that's the case, I'm above the minimum but I haven't received any notifications about payout. I guess it's not automated so do I have to manually request a payout? I went into my account on the AS site but couldn't find anything related to payouts. How exactly do I go about this?

I was never a regular poster on the Hummer thread but I do know a few of you from there. Might get to catch up with you from time to time here now
Dragonblade = Patrick?!

Hey there Caymia. Good to have you onboard.

Martha, that's great to know. There's one particular bird that I would really like to photograph and that's the humming bird. But I confess that Ive never seen one in my life as I live in Australia. I know that they are unique to the Americas. I visited Canada in the late 90s and was hoping to see hummingbirds there but didn't see any. A few years ago, I went to Michigan, US but didn't see any there either. Though I did see fireflies for the first time in Michigan and they were amazing. Really surreal. I regret not being able to photograph them because my camera battery was being charged at the time.

Welcome! Good to see you here, Thijs.

I did some random video searches on Alamy today and I was surprised to find some of my videos on there. By the way, I was not contributing to Alamy in the days when they accepted video.

I clicked on a few videos of mine and under 'contributor', it says: "Pond 5 / Alamy Stock Video." And yes, I also have these same videos on Pond 5.

Actually, I vaguely recall some deal between Pond 5 and Adobe Stock where your editorial videos on Pond 5 could be sold through AS. But I wasn't aware of any deal between Pond 5 and Alamy.

Interestingly, only some of my Pond 5 videos are available on Alamy - not all of them. I wonder if there's some kind of selection process or I guess it could be random.

Though it does seem odd that some of my videos on Alamy are also on my Pond 5 exclusive account. Since they're exclusive, I would have assumed they could only be sold through P5. And there are also non exclusive P5 videos of mine on Alamy.

I did check the details of a few of my videos and I notice my Pond 5 account name on them (on the Alamy website.)

I started with a non exclusive account at P5 some time back. Despite having an extremely small port, I was surprised at the number of sales I was getting. I was quite happy. It looked like P5 had really good potential. But around the time when I opened up a separate exclusive account, everything changed. My sales dropped almost completely. From that point on, sales on my non exclusive account were extremely rare. And after waiting many months, I finally got my first sale on my exclusive account.

If I transfer all the videos from my exclusive account back to my non exclusive account, I wonder if my sales will return to where they used to be. I am actually considering doing that.

Okay this isn't as clear cut as it seems. I'm not sure if I'm using the right pixel dimensions for the 4:3 4k export. The 16:9 version is 3840 x 2160. According to google, 4k video for the 4:3 aspect ratio is 3840 x 2880. But if I chose those dimensions, that would mean that the height of the image would be greater than the original - going from 2160 to 2880. That sounds like an increase in pixels for the height. If that's the case, would that be the equivalent of upscaling to a certain extent which is probably frowned upon? I'm not sure if reducing the long side / the width (3840) to a lower value would be better as that is simply cropping rather than adding more pixels. So keeping the height the same but cropping the sides might possibly be better.

Are there some specific pixel dimensions for 4k 4:3 video that people could recommend?

I guess one way of working this out would be importing some SD 4:3 footage into an NLE program, capturing a frame grab and opening that frame grab in Photoshop. Then take a look at the image dimensions, change the height (in pixels) to 2160 and see what the width value says.

The only problem is I don't have access to my usual computer which has Photoshop and NLE software with frame grab capability.

Edit: Silly me. I just thought of using an online tool to do the conversion rather than going through all that trouble I mentioned above. Apparently, the pixel dimensions I should be using are 2880 x 2160.

Hi! this happened to me too in P5.

If you're resubmitting the same clip you will get the double detection. Double detection reads metadata of your file. So the workaround that i found was to render it again. That will create a new metadata ID for your clip and will be good to go.

Ah yes, I found that out the hard way.   

When you edit your 8mm clip before submit to review you got at the end "curator note".
Just write there "Native format 8mm 4:3" and use some tags like 8mm, old film, archival in the description.

Good tips. I'll definitely write a note to the reviewer. I wish I could use tags like "�ld film" and "archival" but in actual fact, this footage was shot two years ago. I shoot mostly digital these days but once in a while, I'll expose a little bit of super 8 with a 1970s movie camera. I like that retro look.

Why not just crop it tightly and tidy to 4:3?
I'm with them with this one, if the original is 4:3 submit as 4:3, buyer can easily incorporate it into 16:9 as he pleases.

Yea I'm trying to give them what they want. By exporting the clip as 4:3 and 3840 x 2880, I thought it would end up as 4:3. Just a little surprised to see those black borders on the top and bottom.

I submitted the same clip again and it was flagged by their duplicate detector. I sent P5 an e-mail and in their reply, they recommended that I submit the clip as a 4:3 file instead of 4:3 inside of a 16:9 file. So I selected 4:3 with an NLE program and exported it as  3840 x 2880. When I view the thumbnail of the clip, there are no more black bars on the left and right. Though now there are thick black bars on the top and bottom. I wasn't expecting to see those.