Does anyone know anything about this site: http://www.vectorhq.com/premium/artist/2423
They have a few of my vectors and I've never heard of them. Is this a partner site for some known agency? Or are they stealing images?

I've been saying this for years -- what they need to do is put upload limits on contributors and let us edit ourselves. As you get more successful, your upload limit would increase. Likewise if you make poor decisions your maximum number of uploads would decrease, giving you incentive to be choosier about what you upload. They could save a ton of money on reviewers, contributors would be much happier, and I think the overall quality of uploads would improve. But I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for it to happen.

Most of my photos get rejected; I have better luck with my illustrations. If I were primarily a photographer I would have stopped uploading to PD altogether by now.

I upload mostly illustrations to Envato, with a few photos here and there. If most of my uploads were photos, I'd stop uploading altogether.

Thanks for your help. Right now Lightroom is set at ProPhoto RGB, while Photoshop is set at sRBG. So I take it I should set Lightroom at sRBG? Also, when I try to export a file to edit it in Photoshop I get this message from Lightroom, "This version of Lightroom may require the Photoshop camera raw plugin version 8.1 for full compatibility." I don't know if this is part of the problem, or what kind of effect it might have, if any. They recommend updating the camera raw plugin using the update tool in the Photoshop help menu. I tried this and the update failed, so I have to try again later.

I uploaded a couple of autumn landscape photos on 6 micro sites. They looked fine on SS and DT, but they looked so bad on 123, FT, and CS, that I deleted them. It seemed they had lost reds and yellows when viewed on those sites. They were edited in Lightroom 5, I usually edit them in Photoshop, could this be the problem?

October started out great for me at SS, then after the first week or so my earnings took a nosedive. Over the past couple of weeks sales have been significantly lower than normal. Very disheartening considering that October is usually my best month of the year otherwise. I think they must have changed the search algorithm.

Reading this had me close to tears.

Quote from: ultimagaina on June 26, 2014, 20:41
This reminds me of a beautiful Romanian poem: "The death of the Deer"
Here is the approximate English translation:


The sun, melted down on the earth, left behind
An empty, exhausted, blistering sky.
The buckets come up from the fountains all dry
More and more, over the woods fires, fires
Dance above savage demoniac pyres.

I follow my father through the bushes uphill,
The fir-trees scrape me, withered up and evil,
Together, we start the deer hunting quest,
The hunting of hunger in the Carpathian forest.

Thirst ruins me. The thin string of water
Drip, drop, from the spout is sizzling on stone
My temple is throbbing. I walk on another
Enormous and heavy, strange planet alone.

We wait in a place where,
from strings of calm waves,
The streams still resound.
When the sun will be set,
When the moon will rise, round
One by one, in a line, up here,
They will come to drink, the deer.

I say: "Father, I'm thirsty!" He hushes me at once
Bemusing water, how clearly you glow!
I'm tied by thirst to the soul meant to die

At an hour forbidden by custom and by law
The valley rustles with a withered hiss
Crosswise the sky, a dire twilight lit the clouds
and far, above the cliff, blood drips.
My chest is red, as if wiped my hands of blood on it.
With bluish flames through ferns, as in dream
Astounded stars begin to gleam

Sacrifice of my woods, oh, beautiful prey,
How I wish you did not come, how I pray!
She bounces lightly then she stops
And looks with caution through the grass
Her slender nostrils stirred the water
In circles shimmering like brass

A hazy fear glared deep inside her eyes
I knew that she would suffer; I knew that she would die,
As she stood there, still, she was the sheer
Myth of the maid embodied in a deer.

White cherry flowers high above her
The moon was sifting on her fur
Oh, how I wish, oh, how I pray,
My father's gun to miss its prey

The valleys roared

Knelt, in the stream
She raised her head as in a dream,
She watched the sky, the moon, the stars
Then fell
and water gleamed with scars

A blue bird rushed, in a tree, unknown
The deer's life has softly flown
Crying like birds when they depart
And their fall migration start.

I went to close her eyes, below
So sadly laid her antlers shadow
I started livid when, suddenly, offbeat,
My father screeched with joy:
"Meat, we have meat!"

I say "Father, I'm thirsty!"
He nods that I may drink
Bemusing water, how sullenly you glow!
I feel tied by thirst to the soul that died
At an hour forbidden by custom and by law...

But our laws are useless and dead
When our life hangs up on a thread
And custom, law and pity are quickly gone
When sis' is sick and hungry at home

The smoke comes out of my father's gun
The leafage in flocks starts to run!
My father kindles a terrible fire
The wood seems now darker and higher!

I pick up from the grass, as in a dream,
A tiny bell with silver gleam,
My father, from the spit rends with his nails
The deer's heart and her entrails

You, heart? I'm hungry!
I want to live, I wish, although...
Forgive mee deer, forgive me virgin-doe!
I'm tired. How tall is now the fire!
The woods, how deep!

I cry. What does my father think?

I eat and cry!

I eat!

Quote from: sdeva on May 14, 2014, 15:21
I stopped unloading to BS last year because I wasn't on bridge and there sub commissions were not even on parity with SS !!!

Same here.

I'm still getting some 40 cent subscription downloads, in spite of the fact that I've opted out of the DPC. How can I verify that my images are no longer available in the DPC?

Quote from: Sri on May 06, 2014, 18:25
Thanks for starting this topic luis. I have also been trying to get the right machine for me as i was so sick of my dell laptop, specially their support in my country.. Pathetic. Probably dell providing good support in states and Europian country but not in asia.

No Dell is not providing good support in the US - their support is downright horrible! Dell has lost me as a customer forever. They treat their customers like dirt.

I've opted out.

Quote from: Allsa on April 15, 2014, 22:58
I just checked and my images have not reappeared in Shotshop, but they are on photogenica.pl.

I thought they had removed port but I was wrong - the first time I used search words in English (this is how I found my images on ShotShop the first time) and it appeared my images had been removed from the site since they no longer turned up on any of my searches.  But, then I read here about people finding their images by image number, so I decided to give that a try just to be sure and guess what -- my images are still there, but now they don't turn up in searches using keywords in English!! I haven't tested other languages (I don't speak any others) but each and every image that I searched for using DP image numbers was there!!!

For example I have an image in my portfolio of a robot holding an infant. If you search for 'robot baby' or 'robot childcare' on DP, the image shows up in both searches. It does not appear on Shotshop using the same search words - BUT if I search using on DP's image number, there it is! And I tried this same test using several other images, and each and every time the result was the same. To my mind this is irrefutable proof that they were deliberately trying to deceive me and they would have gotten away with it, too, had I not read about it on this forum. Thanks to all who brought this problem to light.

Now the question is do I close my account now with $9.21 remaining there and let them keep the money or wait till it reaches $50 so I can get evey penny they owe me?

I just checked and my images have not reappeared in Shotshop, but they are on photogenica.pl.

Quote from: EmberMike on April 13, 2014, 17:14

Quote from: klsbear on April 12, 2014, 04:06
Fotolia issues a 1099 based on the royalties that were credited to your account during the calendar year, not what was paid out.

I believe their rational for that was that the royalties in your account are listed as credits that you can use to purchase images so they consider that a form of payment.  Those credits can later be converted to cash when they hit the minimum payment but the time of payment is when the credits hit your account.

That's fine if that's what they want to do. But I don't recognize that as the amount I earned. And I suspect neither does the IRS. I can't pay my mortgage, bills, or ebuy a cup of coffee with Fotolia credits, so I only consider the funds they actually pay me with to be my real earnings.

If you go by that logic, then if am paid let's say $100 by check in 2014 and I don't cash that check until 2015, then the $100 doesn't count as income for 2014 and it's added to my 2015 earnings instead. The reason being that I can't pay my bills with a 3rd party check, which means I can't do anything with the money until I either deposit it in my checking account or cash the check. So by your reasoning the $100 doesn't count as income until I cash the check. I don't think it works like that.

I figured out what went wrong - DP reports income according to how much they actually paid out to you during the calendar year, instead of when the royalties are actually earned. So if you let the money accumulate from a prior year without requesting a payout, the earnings from the previous year will be won't be included in that year's total on the 1099 form, they will be carried over to the following year's earnings total. Very confusing because that's not how other agencies report your earnings.

Is anyone (US filers) having a problem with their 1099 form from DP? The 1099 form I received from them says I earned $1050 from DP during 2013. I added up all the monthly totals, and it came to $618! I sent them a support message on March 30, but received no reply, so I called them a couple of days ago, and was told they need time to look into it. Has this happened to anyone else? It's causing a big tax headache for me, and I don't get it straightened out, I could end up paying income tax on $400 I never received!

Quote from: rimglow on March 25, 2014, 22:16
   I see my whole portfolio is on http://dekorowalnia.pl and http://www.blog.artivia.pl. (same ID numbers) As a test, I deactivated one of my files on DP and now when I click on the same file at dekorowalnia and artivia, I get an error message. I sent DP another email about these two sites but no response yet.

I checked both sites and my images aren't there. My portfolio was on ShotShop, but they removed it (around March 8, had to wait) after I sent DP a message insisting that my images be taken down.

Quote from: Jo Ann Snover on March 17, 2014, 16:51
I'm not sure how I missed this the first time around, but I just had a look at the site and the license terms - my stuff is there via CanStock. Quite what sense it makes to says this is "inexpensive" when the prices are from $5 (xs) to $65 (xl) and the same stuff can be had at CanStock prices escapes me

http://www.gograph.com/index/aboutus

I don't see any big rights giveaway in the permitted uses or print run length
http://www.gograph.com/index/eula

Given what I'm seeing in recent (last year or so) CanStock sales - where distribution sales have all but vanished - I assume this isn't working very well for them.

I keep dithering about whether to pull my portfolio from CanStock - I really hate my work being spread about like this...

CanStock is one of my favorite sites, I can't remember them ever screwing us.

Are they a legitimate reseller for CanStock, then?

Has anyone heard of GoGraph?  I just discovered my images are being sold there without my knowledge or consent. A medium size image costs $40 US!!!  Check and see if yours are there http://www.gograph.com/

My images appear to be gone from Shotshop, but they are still on Photogenica.

It looks like most of my portfolio is on the Polish site, too. I don't have anything on Veer, but I do have my port with DP and 123. Where are they getting my images from? Are they a partner with DP?

The best thing we can do to prevent SS from giving us the shaft is to support and encourage smaller agencies. The more successful agencies there are, the less it hurts to drop one when they turn against us. Even 123 turned against us and they never made it past middle tier.

Quote from: Jo Ann Snover on March 01, 2014, 22:00
At a minimum I would not give them new content

Same Here.