Exactly, this is only a craft, like carpentry, like masonry, etc.
Agencies are calling us "artists" only to caress our egos, because it costs them nothing.

Yeah, I mean, if you get even a wee bit artistic with your photos, you're probably staring at a rejection. That's how artistic they like their "artists" to be.

here's a set created yesterday - i checked each of these thru tinyeye & it didnt find any similar images

All of those images look terribly unrealistic. The faces seem thoroughly airbrushed of realistic wrinkles and textures. Look fake even to an untrained naked eye.

Ok then, I can read a book that you wrote - take detailed notes page by page - then "write" my own book and sell it. Hey, I just used yours to "train" myself.  Or as you put it, to "move towards" my own version. You can't point to any identical sentences so my conscience is clear.

Hey, that's how QUentin Tarantino makes his movies.

I would suggest istock because unless the pictures feature children or interiors, they'll all be accepted. Since they're old and you have nothing to lose, even 2 cents per picture would be better than zero.  And generally, there are at least a few pictures every month that make me a dollar or more. I put pretty much all my mobile phone pictures and old images that won't be accepted anywhere else on istock and they generally make me at least a 100-200 dollars a month.

Has anyone noticed that new images don't sell like the old ones. I have almost no sales for images that I uploaded after march 31 2021.

The opposite is true for me. The images I uploaded this year have sold a lot more than images from before.

Just received this lovely email from 123rf about this exciting, new thing they're doing.


"We hope you're well. You may have noticed a Free Images link on our header - well, that's because we're working on a new section on 123RF.com.

About a decade ago, we had a Free Images section on 123RF whereby contributors could choose images from their portfolios and offer it up for free. It drove traffic, exposure and purchase consideration to the Contributor�s portfolio.

Today, we're reviving this initiative and we hope that you�d be a part of this too!

Here�s what you can expect:

1. Portfolio Exposure!

Similar Images from the paid section will be displayed to drive traffic and consideration to paid content and soon to your own portfolio as well. We�re also building in new and exciting portfolio features. So stay tuned for more from us.

2. Easy uploads!

You can upload or pick images to be included into the Free section. We�ve written up a guideline on how you can do that!

3. Monetization!

As we build monetization programs on top of this offering, you'll receive a share as well 😉

4. #FeelsGood

And most important of all, it�s all about giving back to the community!
 
Need more information? Visit 123RF�s Free Images section or email us at [email protected].

We are looking forward to what you could offer and together we can reward our community for their appreciation of our work for all these years. Let�s create and share!

Sincerely,

The 123RF Submission Team"

Whelp, take a look at Vroom's share price over the last few years. Ouch.

EDIT: And saw a boost when the CEO stepped down yesterday to move to...SS

https://finance.yahoo.com/m/fc50bb38-ce62-39a9-88a4-21a1bd539720/vroom-stock-races-ahead-after.html

I don't mind the share price tanking if the guy works for contributors more than shareholders! (Not going to happen I know but still we can dream...)

Won't really work so well in the real world. As someone who does commission work, most of the time the client only has a vague idea of what they want. It's the job of the designer team to come up with a concept which gets refined over weeks before you have final illustration that goes live. I see no scope for refinement with the AI here. And any team would need a ton of stock photography/illustrations to run through their ideas. That way, the free stock sites are a far bigger threat to photographers and illustrators than the AI.

Maybe the only real use I see for this is as a starting point for something you could work on. Otherwise, designing any ad campaign is a whole lot more complex than just typing in a few letters and coming up with an image.

The impression of giving away my photos for free is, a sign of desperation and personally degrading. Free? Don't people have any self respect for what they create?

Well, flickr was (at one point in time) the most popular photographer's network on the internet. People had no issues putting their high resolutions images up without watermarks for free there. All you had to do was right-click-save to steal those shots. The whole idea of hitting the "Explore" page and getting thousands of likes and comments was too hard to resist for a lot of people.

Most of freestock is just that. People who do photography as a hobby and have a day job who just want to put up their images somewhere for likes and downloads. I don't believe most of them are even aware they can make some money off this. Just like people (like myself) during the earlier days of flickr had no idea you could make money off stock photography. It has very little to do with self respect because if you're a mere hobbyist taking snapshots (or even very good pictures), you don't think of your images as "work" anyway.

I shoot a lot of editorial with an iphone. I don't shoot RAW and take the jpeg straight off camera and upload and most of my pics get approved. The trick is to shoot in broad daylight. If the light is challenging, your smartphone definitely can't handle that.

I think generally there is a very limited view of the potential of NFTs. It's not just a picture or artwork you put up and sell. Well, it is that, but can also be much more. Much of the utility of NFTs now (apart from the greater fool theory type stuff) is in play to earn games like Axie Infinity and Metawars and a lot of what people consider "bad NFT art" is utilities that people can use in these games to leverage and make more money.

Now I don't have a crystal ball (no one does) and can't predict how the future would pan out but there are many metaverse platforms like Decentraland, Sandbox etc. that are becoming more popular by the day. People are buying virtual land on these gaming platforms for obscene prices. Samsung is setting up a store on Decentraland so gamers can buy virtual mobile phones to use within the game. So it's perhaps not wildly unrealistic for an artist to maybe rent a bit of land (like you would a website) and put up their images for display or for sale. Virtual museums are already a thing and as the tech goes forward, I only see them getting more prominent. So NFTs have an obvious use case here where you could maybe have a virtual exhibition at a gallery with more potential buyers than you would in a physical gallery. So the opportunities are endless and to look at it only from the current (admittedly frustrating) experiences at platforms like opensea or rarible is a bit limited in my opinion.

+100  Wonder if they will make a movie on this one? Maybe call it "Wolves on Stock"

It'll be kinda cool if they made it with all the footage we all uploaded to Getty...

I disagree with downsizing if you can avoid it. Just looking at best sellers within your own port may not be sufficient data to make this decision. When you look at a range of successful ports you will notice a large number of photos are very large.

The answer to avoiding focus rejections is not downsizing - it's about learning how to nail your focus.

I agree that downsizing may affect some chances of an image being sold because many buyers prefer higher megapixel images irrespective of whether they need it or not. But the problem with a 50 megapixel image is not the focus but the noise, even a little bit of which could get seriously amplified if the sensor isn't good or big enough and which can be a pain to get rid of. So in that case, it might not be a bad idea to downsize it to 20-24 megapixels (which is still a very large image). But yeah, maybe cutting it down to 10 is not such a great idea.