I'm confused.  Does Istock have a disable all button?

Yes of course, although it's not a button. It's a text link at the bottom, "administration". Click on there and you can disable the picture, after entering a reason. I do it regularly when I get notified there is an image going into the dollar bin. I don't want my images there. It's easy.

Make it once - but REALLY HARD IN THE FACE 

Yeah, and make them swallow cevapcici ! 

FUNNY YOU SHOULD BE IN HERE, mr sjl. I THOUGHT YOU WERE EXCLUSIVE WITH ISTOCK 

I don't care who is xclusive where. Sjlocke is a fantastic and successful photographer not hiding behind aliases and I always value his opinion.

yes, it is legitimate competition organised by Heroturko together with Pixmac. Feel free to take part!

Ouch. If they don't know that Heroturko is a pirate, they don't know their business. The proof is that I could download the full children's collection from Rapidshare last year, by links supplied by them. Of course I deleted it. Nice bunch of heroes Pixmac got mixed up with. Glad I didn't load up to them, since they smelt very fishy from the start with their fancy-fair Ipod sweepstakes.

Drupal looked to have some good features

Well a very valid reason for starting from Drupal is that you are a developer and you're at home in the code. I saw the implementation and it's very well done. It's just that no CMS I know of has searching on keywords, and coppermine (CPG) has. The taxonomy idea is OK for a limited number of images, but when the db gets bigger, tag-search might be more appealing to a viewer, since he doesn't have to walk through the categories sequentially. Your tags are just displayed for information purposes, not for searching, as I gathered.

What's mostly done is bridge CPG with a CMS to have the best of both worlds, since CPG doesn't have the functionality of a CMS. You might take a shortcut by injecting the IPTC tags into the Drupal search module and that would solve it basically too, since you're just using the existing db then. It's all a matter of what can be done the easiest way, given your knowledge of any platform like Drupal or Joomla.

Keyword-based search also allows to look for "similars". I have my programming playground set up with a very limited number of images and it doesn't work well, but you can have an idea by clicking here, then scroll down to "file information" till you see "Similar:". You then see a list of clickable keywords from the image. When clicking it, you'll get a page with all images that contain that keyword. For instance click "graffiti" and you will have a search results page with all images that contain the keyword "graffiti". For multiple keywords and AND/OR, also in title and description, you can rely on the standard CPG search module: click "search" button on the bottom left sidebar.

No need to waste your time installing CPG and testing. To have a rough idea, just have a quick look at my mod. I'm also working on a brand new "model" module in CPG (not ready yet) that will allow to search "More files of the same model". The model's name needs to be in the IPTC for that, easy to do with Irfanview.

Finally, I also plan to have licensing in place on every image. Check here and scroll down to "License this file" and see the buttons where the image can be licensed. It's done by putting the comma or newline separated URLs in an unused IPTC text field. The "Shopping cart" button doesn't work yet, since I have to study the Paypal API manual first.

I will probably bridge this gallery with the slightly modified Joomla installation on my main site, under the button 'Portfolio'.

Keep us posted here on MSG about your progress. I will do it too, and when the mod is ready, I will do the same with a link to the zipped CPG install. That can take a while since I still have to do a lot of stupid coding, like managing the new "models" db table. Right now, I poke them in by hand in the MySql.

So there are 3 reasons why people should be cautious of involvement with Dreamstime.

Those reasons are true in varying degrees for all sites. A lock-in is reasonable to leverage against reviewer fees and storage/db overhead, especially when the image didn't have enough time to sell to make up for it. It would even be acceptable to charge for a parking fee in case of withdrawing an image prematurely. There might be an odd site with a bulk removal tool, but I'm aware of none.

Joining an agent is a long time commitment from both sides. The agent invests in you as you invest in the agent. If you join an agent with the intention to leave, that's what I would call "bad attitude".

Of course you can be pissed off for a while by search algorithm changes and shallow reviews, but nothing in microstock is permanent, so the next year, it might all change and you might regret to have left. Even if you hate the guts of a site, you can stop uploading and just cash in once in a while. Deleting a port is a lose-lose situation with one exception, and that is when you want to go exclusive somewhere.

To be successful you have to somehow pay for the production costs of the whole portfolio so the successful images have to be successful enough to pull up the average earnings of all the images.
Does this make sense?

Yes very! But having a very diverse port with travel and models, I would narrow it down to the cost of a shoot versus the yield of all images in that shoot. Some shots in a single shoot are highly successful, others are not. When I look at my waterfalls, one shoot is highly profitable since it's next doors so to speak and the cost was only 2hrs and 3l of gasoline. But I should leverage it against another waterfall (in my opinion better) that took me 4 travel days in the jungle plus 2 hotel nights (at 5$) and a motorbike rent. I tend to consider those shoots together, since you'll never know in advance what will sell, or especially, which one will have extended licenses.

For that, I have high hopes for Lookstat as it will be able to calculate earnings on a defined set of images.

anyone experiencing similar there?

Where is your portfolio link?

I particularly liked request no. 8825 from last Wednesday...  I think I'll see if I can get some of those...

Hahahaha! Well I already have one of Palin chasing icebears eating donuts in the wild as seen from the moon, so don't bother about that one. 

The relevance issue can only be solved fundamentally by contributor-assigned relevance weight to keywords, like by ordering keywords in order of importance, the most important ones first. When I was contributing to the Open Source Coppermine keywords module, an algorithm like that showed to slow down searches exponentially, so perhaps it's not feasable in a db of 5M, soon 10M.

A compromise could be to (a) limit the N of keywords drastically (who needs 80?) or (b) to distinguish between essential and extra keywords, the essential ones being the first 10 or 15 in the IPTC. But it's probably unfeasible to readdress a db of 5M, let alone that contributors won't be prepared to do it.

Relevance is further complicated by the fact that buyers only use 1 or 2 keywords to search, then revert to visual search, - and by the fact that textual keywords are a poor way to describe the mood or the concept of an image.

In this respect, categories are helpful to describe the essentials of an image, and the search option is already there to search within categories - but I doubt whether many buyers use this feature.

Rekeywording and retitling my older images, I noticed that one can't change categories. Reading between the lines of admins on the DT forum, I bet that categories are also used to determine relevance, as well as repeat keywords in title and description. And also that less keywords is better, since it has been stressed repeatedly that irrelevant keywords are bad for search result ranks.

I just checked 123RF and noticed I had a PEL there today. But I don't know how to navigate the site well. Does anybody know how to find the picture that actually sold PEL? All I can find is the mere number of downloads.

The site that was announced on Linkedin. They are trying to make a merge of Flickr and the micros.

Everything Flickr touches becomes dirt. They have this "free" and "sharing" obsession. I didn't notice on Linkedin but my network is not into photography.