Good argument!

I knew this one had the potential to get bloody, but I decided to participate anyway. That's what I like about MSG, the carnage... oops I mean the calm discussions.

I can't say I know enough about the inner workings of any of the agencies to know where the majority of their money goes (ie. contributors, advertising, etc.) You could be right that some guy that looks like the monopoly guy could be walking away with all of our money.

In the end, I will probably give Veer a shot to see if it works for me. I'll have to read all the terms first, though.

While I don't think Fotolia is cooking the books, I definitely don't have a lot of trust in them. The vector price slashing really killed all the trust. I haven't uploaded a file since.

So, say what you want and vent on!

I asked customer support do delete couple hundred files from my queue (at first a did not have IPTC data)  and then I learned that it will affect my acceptance ratio. So now I am *removed coarse language* up cause this will never expire and I have to get same amount images approved to even reach 50%.

And here I thought this was just to punish me. I deleted over 100 images a while back because they didn't sell vectors when I originally uploaded, then they did. I also recently tried to get them to replace some of my original thumbnails because their first thumbnail generation for vectors was garbage. After a few back and forth emails, they said that they couldn't replace the thumbnails and recommended I delete the files and reupload them. I guess it's good I just left them because that would have really dug a hole for me. 

I can't believe this photos.com nonsense is back again. Didn't they see how poorly this went over at StockXpert?

It looks good. The only thing that I can see is that the tongue doesn't really attach to anything and is kind of floating in the mouth. Also, some of your shapes look a little rough. It could be that some of your shadow shapes don't line up right or overlap other edges. The reviewer might have seen something when zoomed in at 800%.

Overall, I think it's a great looking illustration, but it's hard to tell about the execution without digging into the file real close.

Does it affect us?

If anything, I noticed my images aren't on the last page anymore there on the second to last page now. I'm having a great month, so I can't complain. But, I don't think the new best match has anything to do with it.

I'm not sure it really matters as long as the site makes money for the artists and contributors don't feel like they are being shortchanged.

Congrats! I just looked at that today too and realized I was pretty close.

I did better with the new pricing and royalties At Fotolia, but I sold a lot of vectors. Unfortunately, Fotolia implemented new lower vector pricing too, so I'm not sure how long "doing better" will last.

If I take out all the vector sales, I still made a little bit more with the new pricing. S and XS were the bulk of my raster downloads, but they didn't earn as much as my M and above downloads.

In the end, the changes didn't make a huge difference for me, but I can definitely see why people are pissed.

I thought this was interesting. Someone posted a response they got back from Fotolia about the vector changes:

"Thank you for your e-mail. As we mentioned on the previous e-mail, Jpeg files and illustrations that comes with the Vector file format are only for Thumbnails.
Unfortunatelly the Vector file is no longer available in Jpeg format to submit it as Xs, X, M, L, XL, X licenses anymore."

I'm not really sure why they would do this.

I did a search on Fotolia and it looks like most of the new vectors (ones available in just V or XV) were priced at 4 credits. A few were 6 credits and I didn't see any at 8 credits. If new vectors are going to be priced at half the price of the old ones, I don't really see much point in uploading any new vectors there.

It didn't look like any of the old ones had been repriced. They are all still 8 credits. If they plan on halving the price on my old files, I will have to seriously consider pulling all my vectors and just selling my old raster files.

Fotolia what?

When you edit your files, the price automatically is set at 8 for vectors. Does that mean they are going to add in an optional range or just screw us over and lower the price on some of our files?