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Messages - Elenathewise
Pages: 1 ... 15 16 17 18 19 [20] 21 22 23 24 25 ... 36
476
« on: April 20, 2011, 15:49 »
if I were a judge and the claimer proved the company only purchased the correct license after they got your email, I would make the company pay a fee.
If you rob my car but return it to me after I complain, that doesn't stop you from being a robber.
I like this comparison. However, in any legal action you have to show financial loss or other kind of damage. In case of goods stolen from the car and then returned, there is no loss or damage to you. Now, the act of stealing is illegal, but you have to have a solid proof that it actually happened. I had a very similar case to OP's. We found a greeting card with my image and weren't sure if the card company bought the right license. After we emailed them, they bought an extended license right away, within hours of receiving our inquiry. So they were using just regular license for the card before, which was wrong. But we decided just to let it go - what kind of damage or loss can I claim at this point?
478
« on: April 19, 2011, 11:20 »
Which European agencies did you have in mind?
Most of them by invitation only:)
479
« on: April 19, 2011, 11:00 »
A good clean-up will only benefit us in the long run.
Unless they pour out the baby with the bathwater. I understand concerns people voiced here and agree with examples of image spamming. However, I am not a spammer. Why don't they go after the guy with 50 shots of the same pizza slice instead of deleting very questionable "similars" from my portfolio? I also don't understand why automatic removal of unsold images (which they already have in place) is not enough. Dreamstime and other agencies exist because you and me and all of us give them our images to sell. Submitting images to them and get them approved only to find out later that they removed them is a huge waste of time and effort for us. From now on, DT goes on a "back burner" - there are many agencies that are waiting for our submissions, we've been doing extremely well with some of them especially in Europe. Dreamstime will get what they are asking for - much less images from us, if any at all.
480
« on: April 19, 2011, 10:30 »
I don't know why so many people think that old non selling images are a problem and clog up the searches. If an image is old and non selling it will be at the back of just about any search on any site.
I agree. Plus, Dreamstime is a slow site with not-so-great search algorithm, and the fact that images have not sold there doesn't mean they are not sellable - many of my images that had no or very few sales on DT are very good sellers elsewhere. And they do have their "donate for free" or "disable" option for images that hasn't been sold in a while - so why go manual and spend so much effort on combing through collection??... If someone has too many similars and only one or two images out of the series get sold, the rest will go automatically into their free section or get disabled after a while, right? Right. Then it looks like they are just wasting time and effort and pissing off contributors for no good reason. <shrug>
481
« on: April 19, 2011, 10:03 »
Standalone java program. Assumes you have keywords already embedded in the file and just helps you with sorting for Alamy.
482
« on: April 18, 2011, 22:23 »
from what i see here and other threads similar like this, i found that all agencies are nuts
Sadly, so true! 
483
« on: April 18, 2011, 21:11 »
Forgive me for not bothering to sift through 148 pages of your work originally.
Ok. You are forgiven 
484
« on: April 18, 2011, 18:30 »
looks interesting  but where's the download ??
have trawled your site but can't see it !? 
There is no "download" button:) That page is for illustration purposes only. If you're interested in purchasing the tool, please send me a PM or email [email protected]
485
« on: April 18, 2011, 16:55 »
We have a little neat tool to help with sorting the keywords for Alamy - it saved us tons of time. You can see how it works here: http://www.elenaphoto.com/software/epks/Please PM me if you're interested.
486
« on: April 18, 2011, 15:24 »
I personally don't see a vast difference in the moods of these two images and knowing Dreamstime's policy on "similars", you had to have known that one would be rejected. I suspect you did know which is why one was uploaded October 15, 2010 and the rejected one on January 25, 2011. Both images are nice but I can see why the first one was accepted and the second one wasn't. I'm not saying the second one isn't good enough because it's a nice image too, but knowing Dreamstime's policy, which has been around for quite some time, the rejection of the second image shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. I've had similars rejected when they were two totally different concepts... one was about career and family and the other was buying and leasing.
Watcha talking about dude... both images went online on the same day, Jan 25, 2011. They still show near each other on my portfolio (you can't click on deleted one though, it shows you DT's "oops we have a problem thingy:)). Next time you wanna get me, do your homework better ;-)
487
« on: April 18, 2011, 15:09 »
The customers get lousy search results because Dreamstime have a lousy search algorithm, not because of too many 'similars'. For example Shutterstock have even larger series of similar images but the search engine and the customers' buying habits are able to sort the wheat from the chaff quite easily.
Exactly!... Well... some of them make it, some of them don't. I know good people who tried to talk sense into them, to no avail. People that make them most of their money. They are spending all this time and effort manually * images out of library which cost money and is error-prone instead of investing the same time and money into improving search algorithm or at least implementing grouping "similar" images together. One can only shrug....
488
« on: April 18, 2011, 14:23 »
Well. to people that say it's a good thing, here is an example. This one they kept: http://www.dreamstime.com/royalty-free-stock-images-young-woman-cleaning-kitchen-image17802489This one they marked for deletion as similar: http://thumbs.dreamstime.com/thumblarge_573/1294910263pwP7UQ.jpgIf it's not obvious, I can assure you these 2 images convey different moods, have different copy space and both of them can be used in the same project. This is one of my more recent series, so the bozos saw that the second one didn't have downloads yet and decided to get rid of it. It has been online since 01/25/2011 - less that 3 months!!!. I know I should be really mad about this, but somehow it's so ridiculous I can't even be angry. I don't know if this is what Serban has intended - if he did, he is killing his business with his own hands, if he didn't and it's an incompetent employee he is still killing his business with his own hands by letting them do that... Either way, you can always come buy all of my images directly from my site ;-)
489
« on: April 18, 2011, 09:18 »
...and, by the way, lots of removed files are not similar at all to anything I have in my port... and lots of them are new files, too - didn't have a chance to sell yet.
490
« on: April 18, 2011, 09:12 »
I received an email today from Dreamstime with a list of about 500 of my images that have been removed from my on-line portfolio with them because they are "similar" to other images.
Apparently, it's done to "improve my sales". And the files that were removed were "approved by accident".
It looks like they are losing it. It sure looks and feels like complete insanity.
491
« on: April 13, 2011, 18:50 »
My positive - income is pretty stable, in spite of me slacking out for the last few months; some up some down but overall numbers are good. Being able to spend time with my teenage daughter is really nice. Shooting whatever comes to mind. Enjoying other people's amazing work. Convincing my partner that I absolutely need that new super expensive wide-angle lens. Having a dedicated studio to hide from my family from. Lots of good stuff actually:)
492
« on: April 13, 2011, 18:44 »
My positive statement: This shot I made this afternoon of my granddaughter.
What a cutie pie!!!
493
« on: April 13, 2011, 10:56 »
What's interesting to me is that this kind of work *is* available on micros; you can call it "bad business decision" or say it's not commercial enough, but it's there. And of course it's not just this one portfolio. The quality of images available on micros definitely rivals top images from fancy RM collections; if you're price-conscious buyer (and I haven't met a buyer yet who didn't care at all about the price) you can find some unique and impressive stuff for a fraction of a cost. Does it make sense for a photographer? I don't know, it's their business; the internet is equalizing the world and there is nothing we can do about it; 1K a month here in Toronto barely covers rent, whereas 1K a month in, say, Belgrade, is a respectable monthly income. We in developed countries will become poorer and the rest of the world will become richer - it'll take years but it's happening. I guess it's time to look for a cheaper place to live with less taxes... and warmer weather 
494
« on: April 12, 2011, 22:21 »
I've heard for some time people saying that only simple, boring, not artistic, unimaginative , "off-the-peg" images are available on microstock and if you want something more sophisticated you should look on macros. Just stumbled on this portfolio: http://bit.ly/feFYCAWow. Need to step up my game.
495
« on: April 06, 2011, 12:15 »
It does seem like that to me. Drop in IS sales and approximately the same jump on other agencies. Well like I said before if I was IS buyer I'd take my business elsewhere for sure after all the shenanigans. The nasty publicity about the cc fraud and "clawback" was bad enough (seriously, if they had even a tiny bit of business sense in them they should have absorbed the losses quietly instead of creating such bad publicity for the company), and now they are trying to force-feed the overpriced images to their buyers (when most of them are one-person graphic designer shops with very limited budgets). You're thinking - they can't be that stupid, they wouldn't hurt themselves like that! Yup they can and they do
496
« on: April 06, 2011, 11:47 »
About 40% drop for me.
Fotolia and SS are kicking ass though, even DT is doing better than usual... - it does look like buyers are moving over.
497
« on: April 05, 2011, 19:12 »
Well I think we all agree over the last couple of years Istock been busy damaging their own reputation with buyers and contributors. Of course exclusive contributors wouldn't want all that crap to be public and known to customers cause it's damaging their sales.
However, I as non-exclusive don't care much if Istock loses half of it's customers. These people still have need to buy images and they'll buy them somewhere else, and I'll make sure my portfolio is present there.
And yes, that would mean I've wasted time uploading to Istock - but hey, this is how this business is done. Over the years, I've spent time uploading to LuckyOliver, Photoshelter, MediaMagnet, Stockxpert, Albumo, USPhotostock, ImageCatalog,... this is not the entire list probably, but all of them closed their doors. So some other sites picked up their customers, and I am still alive and selling.
And I don't care if Istock was an industry leader for a while - that can change in a blink of an eye. And looks like that blink is happening right now unless people who are making decisions on Istock have an epiphany and stop abusing both buyers and contributors....
498
« on: April 05, 2011, 12:47 »
FYI, update from Andrew:
"We're continuing the Best Match dial turning also. We're working on getting to a set of results where Vetta and Agency are less prominent than they are now but slightly more prominent than they were last week."
Sigh... why don't they quit turning dials and give customers clear option to search Vetta and Agency only, exclusive stuff only, or search anything and everything sorted by good old relevance? Seriously, if I was an Istock buyer I'd be so pissed - I really don't appreciate being fooled or tricked into buying one thing or another. I'd go shop some other place - I think lots of them went to shutter, I had 3 ELs today already:)
499
« on: April 05, 2011, 10:28 »
Submitting to Istock is a big pain - you'll have to disambiguate your keywords and if you're not careful with that your images will get rejected just for keywords; they pay ridiculously low commissions for an entry-level photog - 15%; you images probably won't be seen by anyone since they just tweaked their search to give better placement to their exclusive collections (and you're too late entering the game to be found by "downloads" search option); they reject images for "compression artifacts" or "overfiltered" when it's a raw image converted to tiff and saved ONCE as Jpeg with minimum processing;.... I can go on and on with this, but the question to you is why would you want to spend so much time and effort for something that's so unlikely to bring you any rewards?
I do submit to Istock - but I've been there since 2005 so my images have relatively decent placement in searches and I have someone handling submissions for me. On my scale it's just one of many agencies that we're dealing with, one more one less doesn't matter much. On your scale, you'll spend a lot of effort and frustration on something that's unlikely to bring any reasonable rewards.
500
« on: April 04, 2011, 10:24 »
I have to say that I finally saw an increase in sales on Shutterstock. After sitting at the same level for 3 years in spite of adding lot of new images the sales jumped up, especially this March. I hope the trend continues! :-)
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