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Messages - BaldricksTrousers
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376
« on: April 14, 2017, 02:59 »
What the heck is going on!?
DON'T
PANICIt's just another programming problem which seems to be an inevitable effect of "improvements" to microstock sites. My sales were ridiculously low yesterday, after several strong days, so I wonder if there's more to the bug than just Error 502
377
« on: April 14, 2017, 00:56 »
How about only submit to site where you can set your own price like Pond5 and MotionElements.
With specialist subjects it's probably more important to submit to sites where buyers of that specialist material are likely to look than it is to be able to set your own price.
378
« on: April 14, 2017, 00:30 »
Me, too.
It's redirecting to something called contributor-accounts.shutterstock, which I've never seen before.
379
« on: April 13, 2017, 09:30 »
I still get surges of credit sales, without them things would be a bit dire.
Paul! how do you do it? haha! you always seem to get sales and now credit sales when everyone else is starving alive. DT is right now pushing subs like nobody's business and a changed algorithm that seems to benefit nobody.
Good luck to you! you seam to score where everyone else fail.
How do I do it? By having a portfolio that spans 13 years so it doesn't matter much what age files are selling, by having 5,000 images on DT and a record of sales that may (possibly) give me a personal boost in the search, by having some niche stuff - Qatar - that isn't availalble to most people, and maybe by being easily kept happy since I won't starve even if I never sell another photo, and by trying to regard the glass as being half full rather than half empty. I was surprised to see that nothing I've uploaded in the last two years has sold - I haven't uploaded much, only a couple of hundred pics in all, but there are a couple of stunning Qatar cityscapes that are doing well over on SS and ought to be selling on DT too. As I said earlier, my income on DT is down to a third of what it was ten years ago, so it's not all rosy. But this month I've had half-a-dozen so far that are either $2 subscription sales or credit sales for up to $10.
380
« on: April 13, 2017, 03:19 »
I still get surges of credit sales, without them things would be a bit dire.
381
« on: April 11, 2017, 04:46 »
Looking at the stats of random Dreamstime contributors on their forums, I note that some people have done exceptionally well there. Their number of sales far exceeds their number of uploads. And in some cases, it's over 20,000 sales. Though I'm guessing that a lot of these impressive figures occurred in the distant past when things were supposedly 'better' - the glory days so to speak?
Oh absolutely I have over 20K sales there but 90% of those before 2015 after that its just turned very sour.
2008/9 was my high point. I'm only selling a third now of what I did then and, of course, my portfolio is a lot bigger than it was in those days. Overall I've got close to 30,000 DT sales but that is over almost 13 years, so it's only a bit above 2,000 a year on average.
382
« on: April 11, 2017, 02:18 »
I am not sure if it is lack of customers or over supply of contributors, or both.
It's both. It has to be.
383
« on: April 11, 2017, 02:10 »
My earnings per upload seem to be about the same as BAZ and CHJ. My portfolio is not "High Commercial Value", it's basically food and travel with hardly any people shots.
The return is currently about 1c per month per upload. As I've got thousands of files online it is still enough to pay the occasional bill, whether it is worth the effort to upload more is something people need to work out for themselves. I'll still send stuff sometimes if I have nothing else to do but I don't expect an exciting return from extra effort any longer.
384
« on: April 11, 2017, 02:06 »
There are problems. Not normal when you receive multiple e-mails about old files, i have 5 or 7 copies last days.
If you uploaded a bunch on a certain day and several of them haven't sold three (?) years later you will get an e-mail for each of the unsold files asking what you want to do with them. It IS normal.
385
« on: April 08, 2017, 04:13 »
It was scanned by a lab, not myself.
That doesn't mean it's been well scanned. I had a roll of 35mm developed and scanned by Peak Imaging, which is one of the best specialist labs in the UK, and found I could do a far better job myself on my Epson V500, but manually scanning each image is very time consuming, and so can the subsequent processing be if there are any dust spots or scratches. Peak Imaging's scanning isn't cheap, either. It's superior to what you will get from a High Street lab.
386
« on: April 08, 2017, 00:54 »
Hi all,
I am not sure if editorial on Alamy can be only RM or I can upload new pic also to Alamy and other places also like RF now?
Thanks
Forget the legal eagle remarks. All that matters is what Alamy's rules are. They used to say they wanted stuff uploaded to the same kind of license elsewhere as it was with them, and seemed to accept that Editorial was the same as their RM (though actually it wasn't). Now that they have started selling RF and RM and, I believe, RM as RF I'm not sure what rules they have for that. They used to have an RM Exclusive license, which meant only they had the content - I don't know what they have done with that, it doesn't seem to be there on the new uploading system. At that time you could obviously upload RM elsewhere as long as it wasn't Alamy exclusive. If they just have two license types now, then presumably it is the Alamy RM Exclusive license that has gone, and the old exclusive content is being sold on the same license as non-exclusive.
387
« on: April 08, 2017, 00:47 »
Here's someone on Dreamstime who got into trouble for uploading photos of a monastery as commercial.
https://www.dreamstime.com/thread_45949
That thread shows that it is no use saying "US law says this, therefore that's all that matters". Different places have different laws and no international stock business can make rules that will fit every possible jurisdiction.
388
« on: April 08, 2017, 00:37 »
Well, anything that will pass inspection on SS will pass Alamy - that was my point, I didn't make it clearly.
389
« on: April 07, 2017, 12:18 »
Would Alamy accept scans of medium format transparency film? I have an MF image that sold and won a prize in an exhibition and also won a photography competition organised by a magazine. However, when you zoom in on the scanned image on a computer monitor, it doesn't look as sharp as zoomed-in images from my digital Micro 4/3 cameras. Though that same file was used to produce quite a large print for the exhibition (and the print looks nice and sharp.)
I've got quite a bit of medium-format film on SS - one of my best sellers among them - file number 68871745 shot on a Pentacon Six. Another was shot on a 1930s folding camera (B&W, that one, so no CA problems). So they will accept it. The real issue with film is the quality of scanning. I spent a lot of time learning how to scan manually on an Epson V500. Automated scanning is no use at all, it simply doesn't deliver the best quality - even from one of the best specialised film processors in the UK (I've compared their scans with what I can achieve, and it's like a P&S vs a 6MP DSLR). PS - I've had Velvia transparencies, colour negs (including Fuji 400H), and B&W Fomapan 100 accepted.
390
« on: April 07, 2017, 11:56 »
and the categories pointless.
Are they, though? Years and years ago one of the top people in an agency - DT, I think - did a blog saying your should use as many appropriate categories as poss because clients used them to filter their searches. And all the agencies I supply seem keen to keep requiring categories to be chosen, which suggests they all regard them as important.
391
« on: April 07, 2017, 05:22 »
You can decide a default pseudonym (1) and kind of license (2).
Thanks. I need to leave the license as RM because I don't want things that are RM popping up as RF - even if only briefly - and needing to be changed, but I'll do something about the pseudonym.
392
« on: April 07, 2017, 01:37 »
I thought it would be impossible to make the uploading process to Alamy worse than it was, but they seem to have managed it. I suppose it's great if A) you don't want to bother doing anything more after you've uploaded, regardless of how much visibility your work loses; or, B) you upload hundreds of similar images all at once and can bulk process them all at once. However, if you do small batches of different subjects, keeping track of what has or has not been fine-tuned after upload is a nightmare, and trying to fine-tune it batch-by-batch is clumsy and awkward. Everything is going on sale RM which usually needs to be changed, a less-used pseudonym is inappropriately stuck on everything and I have to go through a great pile of batches to try to find anything and work out if it has been updated post-uploading or not.
If you don't keep a note of all the batches and whether or not you have dealt with them, you end up with files on sale with no "super" keywords, which presumable means they have no chance of getting a good search position, ever.
At least the old system kept files off-sale until you knew you had dealt with necessary adjustments.
393
« on: April 07, 2017, 00:46 »
I doubt if there's any legal requirement for companies to keep in cash all the money needed to make future payments to contributors, just as you don't have to keep in hand all the money needed to pay suppliers of other goods - you just need to come up with it when the bill falls due.
Sorry but the money has to be kept and not used or invested and it's a liability. I'm pretty sure you and the rest here who think it's advantage are wrong. That's why many sites have lowered the payout to get the money owed off the books. Ask an accountant about owed commissions or escrow funds. SS or IS or anybody does not profit from what they hold, and they can't count it as an asset or invest that money.
Well, that's good to know. I'm not American so I'm not clued up on US business law.
394
« on: April 06, 2017, 13:55 »
whats the point then of uploading when genuine and hard work dont count for nothing.
Well, that's the big question, isn't it? We're all competing against 120,000,000 other images so the cake is going to be sliced very thin. The agencies only care about having the necessary file available to meet the buyer's needs. They don't care how much or how little effort went into making it.
395
« on: April 06, 2017, 11:59 »
I don't see that the BBC has any holding on this company yes they use them but it's an independent limited company
I guess I'm mistaken, I read that somewhere a while back.
396
« on: April 06, 2017, 11:53 »
. And I'm not going to fall for your trap by posting the image here. It's not available on the internet at this current time.
If you knew who Sean Locke is you wouldn't have said that. He's one of the most respected figures in the industry.
397
« on: April 06, 2017, 00:56 »
Just for info, Science Photo Library is the BBC's, so it's a prestigious agency and presumably supplies material to BBC science programmes and stories, as well as for general use.
398
« on: April 04, 2017, 23:56 »
Among my total port I have around 70 pictures which I am completelty alone in having......They were still there of course but when buyers searched somebody elses images came up given the same category etc.
Surely you give your own answer? At one time you got all the sales because you were alone in your niche, now you have a competitor in your niche. Maybe it's a subject where your rival's images make an acceptable substitute to illustrate a concept, even if the subject matter is not exactly the same as yours. I believe I was the second person to have pictures of the iconic Santorini blue-domed Greek churches on Microstock, in the summer of 2004, and they sold very well for a few years but now they've been swamped by newer material. It happens. (And I bet the first person to upload the subject was less than pleased when mine turned up a few weeks later!).
399
« on: April 04, 2017, 06:22 »
^ I read somewhere the important thing was the first 4-5 pages? given the default search and amount of pictures on the page!
That's one of the advantages of having stuff from small niches - if there are only a handful of shots of a subject then you have a good chance of selling on the few occasions someone searches for it. I don't reckon I'd have much chance of ever selling a "beautiful business woman with her team" if I shot it, whereas my Circassian chicken on a plate sold a couple of times in the past week - even though everybody knows what the first of those is and not a lot of people are familiar with Circassian chicken (though in a curious nod to the influence of beautiful women, the name of the dish is said to be derived from the skin colour of the Circassian beauties in the Turkish Sultan's harem) .
400
« on: April 04, 2017, 06:10 »
I doubt if there's any legal requirement for companies to keep in cash all the money needed to make future payments to contributors, just as you don't have to keep in hand all the money needed to pay suppliers of other goods - you just need to come up with it when the bill falls due.
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