I have 24-105 but it's not so good for high quality images, after 70-80mm (until 105), the image quality isn't good. But I bought to make videos. It's a perfect walk-around lens also.

Quote from: cthoman on February 27, 2013, 00:30
Features are nice, but it really comes down to price, royalty rate and licensing agreement. If those are good, then it's something I'd consider.

This thread is about your opinion... What do you expect from a stock site???
For the licensing agreement I would like to introduce something extra and automated. Not the classic "you will earn 40% and I'll change if I want". For example, at SS, those who deserved could keep the referral earnings, if the system would be based on the actual income based on contributor sales... Like at MLM systems... - example: for lifetime earn the x% of the referred member's income, multiplied by your y income...

The time arrived to start developing my own personal stock site that will be open for other contributors also.
Since more than a year I started to develop web sites (webshops, company homepages) just to learn linux+php+mysql to create the best site I can...
I want to sell photo, vector, audio and video licenses, all these via a web site that has all the whistles and bells that a stock site needs. Yes it's a huge amount of work, but I wrote my own object-oriented php libraries and the code it's based on the Yii framework. Note that I'm putting together the pieces of the project since 2 years ago...

A brief list of targets and features:
- photo, vector audio and video licenses
- privately owned and - as the circumstances permit - upgraded servers. (To exclude the high, dedicated servers costs)
- ~1 year testing and image uploading period with zero advertising, just SEO
- in-house development, not waiting/paying programmer teams to achieve basic results/changes
- unique features & offers that agencies have partially (image fingerprints, copy space and important colors recognition and very fast search engine with detailed filters) - these may be the key features over other stock sites... I need to offer something extra...

I'm on the final stage of the project's documentation and I thought, before finishing, I will ask the people here what they always hated/liked or wanted at stock agencies. I want to have an ultra-friendly buyer/contributor portal...

Where can I see the tax withholding amount???

As I was looking at my support tickets, I saw a message from 2009 I forgot about, they said my tax withholding amount is 30%. However Romania has a 10% tax treaty with US. FL says in the ticket response, I need an ITIN number. But as far as I know, ITIN numbers are given only to US residents... True?

... very sad if they withheld from me 30% instead of 10%...

Quote from: hotwalkn on February 25, 2013, 18:50

Quote from: luissantos84 on February 24, 2013, 22:59
sorry Teresa but DP being top seller for you doesn't mean much, you have 4 sales

Are you suggesting I shouldn't bother posting in the threads because I'm a newbie?

What Luis is trying to say here is that it's too early to say 'best seller' based on extremely tiny numbers. After a year you can draw a line and see the results. Unfortunately for the newly uploaded images luck means more than anything else. The new images become known after 1-2 months and start selling after 6-12 months. This, of course, without an old portfolio that 'pulls' the new images.
On the top of that, the guys behind the search engines are always playing with the parameters so you may realize after several months, that your best seller agency is the worse from now on...

Yes... A way of stupid coding, the user has to figure out what and how. There are no hints, messages, etc.
I spent around 15 minutes on the site to figure out, I need to select all the unpublished stuff and set the language to English...
It's a good feature, but...
- since English is the most commonly used, there's a practice to start the list with 'English'. No here I must select from the deep
- I agree, if auto-select English, nobody will change the language. Then, a 'Default language' option would be good...

Quote from: ShadySue on February 17, 2013, 17:46

Quote from: luissantos84 on February 16, 2013, 22:37
Easter apple background bag beauty cheese cooking countryside cube cuisine dinner dish drink egg eggs fatty flour fruits garlic greasy health heap hole home isolated lettuce long market meat mess milk mustard pasta restaurant sandwich shop shopping smoked spring straw summer tomato vegetables water wet white wine

should be:

Easter cooking cuisine egg eggs fatty health

(and even these)

I wouldn't use Easter, cooking, cuising, fatty or probably health.
OTOH, I have no idea what Fotolia's keywording standards are: maybe they're very loose.

Let me complete the list of the keywords and comments (just to be academic):
egg, eggs, whole, broken, yolk, yellow, half, raw, ...
I would not include:
- easter. Who want to find egg (for any reason) will type 'egg' or 'eggs'. Question is, it's good to show some ordinary, raw eggs when searching 'easter'?
- cooking, cuisine: there's no cooking on the image, and also eggs are not necessarily connected to cooking! No kitchen also
- health. It depends on the person, for some folks, eggs are really not healthy
- fat, fatty. Does not relate to eggs

Quote from: OM on February 17, 2013, 01:06
As long as keyword spamming goes 'unpunished', it remains profitable in the mind (and maybe in sales) of the offender.

For sure, I agree (joking, NOT cynical). It's highly profitable for the contributor alone, and also, if others does not spam - IMHO.
The problem arises when
- other contributor's images are placed far from the first pages due to spamming
- buyers who really want to find something and have no option 'don't show this image anymore' option, see the same image when searching different terms...

I'm a buyer sometimes and I'm struggling to filter out some aggressively upcoming images I just don't want to see anymore...

A strict keyword policy is very good for an agency, it helps a lot the buyers to find exactly what they want, not just browse the huge mess again and again...
I think, the loose keyword policy and the slow page loads is responsible for the huge earnings drop at FL...

Quote from: ShadySue on February 16, 2013, 22:54
The agencies made a noise about keywording, but ignorance and spamming goes on at all of them nevertheless.

Ok, we all make mistakes when keywording. In the worst case, let's say 6-8 keywords remain from a previous image... And this for several images...
But it's too much to include mainly unrelated keywords... And for EVERY image in the portfolio...

I'm shocked about the list of the keywords of this image:
http://us.fotolia.com/id/49296327
and also about the other keywords from this portfolio...
I remember, 1-2 years ago, almost all the agencies became very upset on keyword spamming... Except FL?

- have employees or work as a team?
what means yes?

BTW very nice infographic, congrats!

Maybe they discovered the so called caching technique and the IT guys are making some changes...
It's unbelievable they are reading from DB and calculating a contributor's earnings upon every page request... And the best solution until now was... limiting requests by captcha...

Quote from: MisterElements on January 22, 2013, 19:21
My sales from FT, IS and 123rf are up! SS, DT, Can and Big are steady or normal.

This is why my sales have been dropped...
Anyway... Just consider every photo bought... Why they may want to buy again and again your shots? Time to upload something new. I have a lot of photos on my HDD, anybody wants to keyword and upload them? I can offer 15% revenue, 16% if the redeemed credits... so on...

Quote from: luissantos84 on January 03, 2013, 23:21
icefront does your cousin has model releases for the teeth?

As I know, no MR's are required for the teeth... As you don't need MR's for hands, feet, etc. I talk a lot with my cousin but he never told me he had problems with teeth-related photos regarding MR's.
BTW he's a dentist... Stock is just fun and financing lenses, cameras, etc.

Me and my cousin, we have a similar situation. This was shot in my studio. I took several shots of him at work and lately I found good for stock...

My photo:

http://www.dreamstime.com/royalty-free-stock-photo-photographer-taking-photos-image17280565

His photo:

http://www.dreamstime.com/stock-image-youth-music-image17466031

Quote from: stockastic on December 12, 2012, 19:41
Does anyone have a clue as to what's going on?

The editor (not only @ SS) don't have "Don't like this image" option so they must pick something. I guess the "out of focus" it's at the beginning of the list.

Most of the times I receive this rejection too... I think, the reason must be something else than focus.

Very much looking forward to some civilized and constructive payouts with you, iStock.

First I think, your account was hacked via a keylogger/backdoor/etc.
The other guess would be, you logged in to paypal account from elsewhere than your home/personal computer, where a malware was installed...?

In any cases, it's best to change passwords frequently...

BME - Best Month Ever

FL - Fotolia

What's FT
Following the FT rule, Dreamstime would be DS, Shutterstock SR, Stockfresh SK and so on.

There are 2 words: foto and lia. BTW, these are differently colored...

LCV - Low Commercial Quality (common rejection reason) @ http://www.microstockgroup.com/index.php?page=microstockacronyms - LCV - Low Commercial Quality Value

On behalf of icefront1974, here are some thoughts...
1. I think, at the given number of images, the database operations have obviously some delays... Until newer technologies are developed this waiting time will be longer and longer...
2. I had many times the feeling that, being  a reviewer, after looking at a series of really good images, the next 100 seems really bad - although they aren't really bad - only compared...
3. they may rectified their decisions, resulting in a 'no comment'. Although I received many times 'low commercial value' rejections, reviewers always picked the most sold images on other sites. So it's an open question to me also, agencies train their reviewers on what has real commercial value or they simply reject what they don't like???

1. ImageVortex - very stupid acceptance rules, no sales at all - basically they wanted a good collection instead of a decent stock photo library
2. Crestock - images uploaded after 1 year counted from uploading to regular agencies, were rejected with randomly picked (stupid) reasons. What they want to teach me? BTW no sales, this is the main reason
3. Thinkstock - sales report too symmetrical across months. I strongly had the feeling that the $5-$10 income doesn't make me rich, but something isn't in order...
4. Zoonar - overcomplicated, no sales
5. Panthermedia - overcomplicated upload process, no sales (not true, I have €38 since 2 years, this worth at least 6 beers in better places)
6. FeaturePics - if I upload the other half of my portfolio will I earn an average of $6 instead of $3 monthly?
7. StockPhotoMedia - no changes since 2006. I have a feeling that hotel Master Johan is the main business...
8. MicroStockPhoto - no comment
9. Albumo - I'm too tired to re-upload again

Quote from: stockastic on July 06, 2012, 22:04
I looked around their site but didn't find any actual statement of the new policy on 'similars'.  Does anyone know from experience what might happen, or want to make a prediction?

It's up to the reviewer's taste, what he/she feels similar... Regardless of the fact that the agency constantly states that they are so called "professionals". Simply the word doesn't cover anything. Anybody can be professional when he is able to decide...
I'm also tired to death hearing "official" comments about content that isn't accepted due to the fact that they can hurt our sales. This isn't true. What isn't accepted and isn't sold, can't have statistics. Also, we, contributors obviously have a better look over what is selling best, while a single agency sees the market from his own (very closed) point of view. Thus, the majority of "low commercial value" or "similar" images are only GUESSED. While a series of images are sold good at some agencies, a several ones consider them non-creative, doing nothing else but kill the opportunity to the sales, not teaching the contributors.

I like the "view information" link. It displays everything I doesn't need
What about: upload date, reject reason, views, sales, etc.? Well, these aren't important.

This feature is a starting one for many new stock sites. Why took it so long to implement? Students learning php do this in one afternoon...
BTW PD is the same. They need several years to implement a decent upload system, where they are from batch editing?