Mine are back, but no additional images - IOW it does appear they've stopped adding files.

I think it's time for Brian to step in and give us an update on how long it will be before the images are removed.

As it's now been a month since I opened the support ticket (with no answer), I thought I'd update it with a couple of paragraphs saying: I think a month is plenty of time to answer even a non-critical question, and that even if they have some policy decision they're working on, some sort of response explaining it may be a while would be appropriate.

I realize that providing decent service to contributors who pay their salaries (and loan payments to H&F) isn't a priority any more, but this is just crappy, rude customer service.

The swan isn't well focused - bits are sharp and others aren't. If you're going to have an image with selective focus, have some clear reason for why the bits in focus are. The paper is really ugly and the lighting doesn't work (some parts looked bleached).

Forgetting the conceptual relevance of the sandwich, your whites are gray, the highlights are blown and the crop is awkward.

Liz' advice is good - stick with application shots that are technically flawless and have three different types of subjects. You can try for clever stuff after you can get shots past inspection on a regular basis.

I don't think I'll be updating FB with someone else's photos - we were asked not to download our own! I suspect that if this gets used a lot, the images will get lifted and re-used by others on FB - seems to be a grab and go environment.

This seems a bit like the IS experiment with VOX (and people there who weren't already contributors didn't use many of the images), but perhaps this will catch on. I find it hard to believe people will use a purchased photo for something as personal as FB, but we'll see.

Seems to me that the service will have an incentive to "feature" more prominently those entities that pay it the highest monthly fees. That isn't going to get the buyers the best images or help an individual photographer with great images but which pays a low fee.

And none of this says (I may have skipped as I did skim this) how this service is going to attract eyeballs. As we know, that costs money and if you don't spend any you get StockFresh - great site with no buyers.

The model I can get my head around is where both the agency/service and the contributor make money out of the same thing. With this model, it appears that the service makes money by attracting more punters to pay more fees, not by selling more of my images.

... Apart from even that, there's the heavy discounting, IF in fact they're really discounting.  Looking at a sample of some of my earnings for just the large size, the royalties all vary.  

At $1.07 per credit, a large size image costs the buyer $3.21.  At 50% commission, I should receive $1.61 for each. ..

A sale today made me take a look at some of this month's sales to see what sort of discounting of credit prices was going on. I wasn't happy with what I saw.

If you look at their prices, they offer credit prices as low as 68 cents a credit via web purchases - so we would get 34 cents a credit from those sales. I don't much like that, but the actual prices per credit go way, way lower. They're offering a 42% discount on those (supposedly rock-bottom) prices based on royalties I've seen just looking at May's stats. 40 cents a credit, or thereabouts. That leaves us with 20 cents a credit in royalties (under the current scheme).

There's no reason to think the discounts will go away Jan 2013, so they'll be paying even lower than 50% of 40 cents a credit to many contributors.

I saw my royalty at 80 cents for an XL, 60 cents for L and $1.00 for an XXL. There were some smaller discounts - an XL for $1.13 which means the buyer got a 17% discount on the 68 cents "minimum" credit price.

At 60 cents for a large, that's what I used to get from IS in 2004 when the prices were $1/2/3 and we got 20 cents/40/60 for S-M-L

The idea that 123-rf is lowering even these wretched royalties come January is just shameful.

As my return to DT was relatively recent (June 2011),  my portfolio is still relatively bottom heavy (lots of uploads and not so many level 3 and up images).

My RPD has been climbing with their recent changes, but not enough to offset the decreased downloads. So the net is that I see this as a loss, not a gain.

For example, in March, my RPD was $1.11 and this month it's $1.77, but I had nearly twice as many downloads in March as May, so the net is a lower total for May.

November had an RPD of 98 cents, but beat the pants off every month this year.

I'd love to see a survey showing what buyers think of this enormously complex pricing scheme at DT

Reserve it for whatever floats your boat.

When an entity is handling large sums of money and finds just about every accounting procedure a challenge - whether it is the amounts of back payments or the timing of royalties due - I find the term appropriate. Not because it's exciting, but because it's amazing they get to continue with this amateur hour behavior.

They can and should do much better.

Thanks for posting about that - I hadn't noticed that the amount was wrong when I got the payment, just transferrred to bank account and moved on. I guess I'm only slightly miffed that the "fix" is to pay the amount on Thursday that they should have sent on Monday.

Slightly miffed because I find it breathtaking that an organization that's been paying us for a long time could just mess it up this week, and that they could have such lax controls on their systems that they pay the wrong amounts. I suppose I should be grateful it was only a mixup with weeks, not with contributors. Although, if they wanted to send me sjlocke's weekly payout, that'd be fine with me (perhaps less so with Sean

As noted the files are still being transferred, and now 44 of mine show up.

In addition to doing very odd things with the keywords - it looks like the "main" keywords are just taken from the title - what they've done on some images to the descriptions is downright bizarre. Many images have no descriptions, but those which do have some jumble of words - nothing I ever put

For example, for an image of lounge chairs on Grace Bay Beach, the Alamy description is "activity businesses Central Americas seat seating furnishing".

On Veer, the title is "Lounge chairs on tranquil Grace Bay Beach" and the description is "Beach chaises at water's edge on the soft white sands of Grace Bay Beach, Turks & Caicos" Where did they get business and Central Americas out of that?

And the credit line doesn't include our name - just � Alamy Creativity/Alamy. I think that's fairly standard for these re-distribution deals, but I don't like seeing my images with someone else's copyright on them

I guess I'm in the minority, but I'm not happy that I can't read the license terms under which an image of mine was sold. I'm sure you're not giving away the store for a small amount of money, but I have no way of knowing what rights you're negotiating for those fees.

Depending on the terms granted, those royalties could be fine or totally and utterly unacceptable. Telling me I can't know anything but the money I received is just not OK

I think you need to go back to the drawing board and come up with at a minimum a list of the basic terms and options you offer with these deals and the royalties that go with them.

If you won't provide any information on what you're doing, then I want an opt out for those (not just for sensitive uses). I can't believe that an agency that has been reasonably transparent and straightforward for so long would be trying to pull this "you can't know anything but the money you receive" stunt.

+1

And it looks like the numbers discrepancy on Veer is a glitch.  I checked my portfolio twice: first time there was 461 images, second time there were 516 as expected.

Not for me - no matter how many times I check, the smaller number is the same. I refresh the page, click See all - nothing changes. And it was that way a week or two ago when I first posted here about files not appearing in my public portfolio.

If you try your full name in double quotes on PocketStock, do you find anything that way? There's no link to an artist's portfolio from one image, so after I found one of mine through I search I tried the double quoted name, and that worked - for me anyway.

So my whole Veer portfolio is at PocketStock, at prices from $70 to $840 - as opposed to $2 to $30 at Veer itself.

The reason it's especially remarkable that is that the entire 839 images I've had approved appear at PocketStock, where only 593 images appear on Veer's own site.

Think about that for a minute. They can get all the images displayed on a partner site where they can rip me off (if in fact we get paid the Veer royalty only should they make a sale through this other site) but not at "home"?

Incompetence, naked greed and almost total non-communication - Brian, saying it's "that has not been the case here" doesn't begin to cover it - is a really toxic brew.

We need some immediate clarification of how many sites you've sent our work to, what our royalty is for each of those, how those partner sales are recorded and why you don't display approved works on Veer's site when you do on the "partner" sites.

Talk about ways to instantly demolish trust...