I would not be surprised if other stock agencies were already marking their images in some way. BUT I would be surprised if they'd talk about it, even to the owner of another agency.  They'd use one of the more sophisticated hidden watermarking schemes that supposedly will survive resizing or crropping - so they'd have it in place in case they found someone ripping them off in a major way. 

It seems to me this is only going to get worse. Subscription pricing would let a crook cherry-pick thousands of highest-quality images that would, over time, bring in much more than he paid for them when re-posted as new portfolios elsewhere.

Many submitters still see 0 views on new images.  This problem began sometime in February and was acknowledged (sort of) by StockXpert quite a while ago, but people continue to post on the StockXpert forum, saying their recently uploaded images get no views, and there are no more official replies. 

Since the search results are weighted - in part - by past popularity,  no views of an image while it's new amount to a kiss of death and it sinks like a stone.

I was one of the submitters getting 0 views, and I quit uploading to StockXpert weeks ago.  I am wondering if anyone else has news on this situation, or has maybe continued to upload and seen things improve.  Based on the forum posts I'm seeing, nothing has changed.

I know some of you are now ready to jump in and say "no problem, it's working for me",  but please do not add to our pain with tales of success        as it is now well known that this problem does not affect all submitters, and that older images continue to sell.

I am sorry I even looked at that logo. I will have bad dreams.

Gee I'm sorry, Dad.

But I think it's a perfectly logical question and relates directly to the original poster's complaint.  In order to use the keyword "business" do I need to have people in the photo who are obviously engaged in "business"?   A quick search on IS tells me the answer is "no".  There are many shots of objects that relate to "business" far less directly than a pair of handcuffs relate to "arrest".

Then I think you can add "no elephant" too, if there's no elephant in the shot.  

Reason with me here.  IStock allows the keyword "business", it's in their controlled vocabulary.  But you can't photograph a business. It isn't an object, it's a concept that gives context to what's actually in the image.     So when, exactly,  can I use the keyword "business"?

The additional cost for making the photos available on JIU/photos.com might be next to nothing.  If IStock's system is a clean back-end architecture they can grant access their database to a new marketer who then extends his own front end to search and display those images along with what they already have.  The content (images with associated keywording, indexing, popularity ranking, exclusivity flags etc) doesn't have to move, or be duplicated. It may already be on a big globe-spanning back end like Amazon's infrastructure.

Any changes to that content by IStock are immediately reflected in search results at the new outlet.   After the front end is set up,  ongoing costs to the new outlet might be just those of bandwidth. 

One database - multiple front ends.  Multiple prices.  Maybe one takes VISA, the other Discovery. 

So for a photo of handcuffs, "arrest" is not sufficiently relevant. But "nobody", is ok.

IStock is truly another world.    I think I'll start adding "walrus" and "carpenter" to all my IStock submissions.

Not to repeat myself, but...  I advise not spinning your wheels trying to get into IStock because even if you do, you may end up even more frustrated when they reject what you feel are your best shots, and you can't figure out why.  And now they've added weird keywording rejections to the mix.  The extremely long review times make it hard to make progress unless you keep notes on which images were rejected, when, and why.   

And when you finally do get some shots up there you may find, as I did, that there are no sales at the end of this road.   I think it depends a lot on your subjects, but for me, it's just been a big waste of time so far.

I suggest concentrating on other sites until you get a feel for what sells, among the shots you are able to do.  Once you have a sizeable group of images that are selling on a couple other sites, you can try pumping them into IStock and see if any of them sell there, too.

Some submitters seem to produce what IStock wants and get good sales but for me, sales at IStock are insignificant compared to Shutterstock.  The steady sales at SS - even though the money is peanuts - have helped me learn what sells.

Someone please explain to me why Alamy makes contributors upload these gigantic resampled images.  To me it makes no sense at all.  It's a huge waste of storage for Alamy -  they could just automatically upsample an image themselves for download, instead of storing all these terabytes of previously upsized images, and use the best (most expensive) software to do it.  If the upsampling software is improved, buyers instantly start getting better images.    It's a big waste of time for contributors too.   

I think it makes Alamy look like a bunch of old f@rts who don't understand the technology.

As I see it buyers are offered several price points on every microstock. with subscriptions being the lowest of course.  While the prices themselves may have increased, my impression is that subs make up an ever-growing percentage of sales. So the result is an ever lower average return on an image.  Isn't that what's happening?

Getty wants to own the image business, and they want to end up with 2 tiers.  They'll continue to use subscriptions and forced cross-listing to drive down microstock prices until serious, talented professionals (which I am not, btw) give up. Microstock will become just a giant bargain bin full of mediocre and/or dated images.  New, high quality images will only be available at much higher prices, through other Getty outlets.

Microstock will survive for a while but eventually technical standards and expectations will creep up - higher resolution, better lighting, more dynamic range - and cultural styles and editorial subjects will change - so the old archives won't sell as well.  New microstock images will come from hobbyists who don't need to recover their costs, but won't spend money on professional models, lighting, setups or locations.

Embrace, extend, extinguish.

(These are just my own, relatively uninformed, ideas - although I'm serious, I actually think this is what's happening.)

madelaide - downsizing, or resampling, would very likely destroy it.  Maybe there's some black-hat stuff that NSA uses, that distributes the "watermark" data around the image.   

I don't think there's a simple answer to this problem.   

Bottom line, I think, is establishing the identity of contributors.  If I just create a login and start submitting photos by FTP, the site has no leverage on me. If they know and have verified my identity, and I submit someone else's copyrighted material, then it's a law enforcement matter.  The problem of identifying such material still exists.

Technology exists to put hidden watermarks in jpgs.  Of course pixels have to be altered, but  it can be done in such a subtle way that the human eye couldn't distinguish it.  This is not new and I'm surprised that IStock and other microstocks aren't doing it. It would let you filter out images that were purchased at other agencies.