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Messages - Jo Ann Snover
5576
« on: February 29, 2012, 17:04 »
$50 used to be the placement fee that Getty would charge for one of its uncurated collections - I think it was Photographer's Choice. The opportunist offering this deal probably figures that if he/she picks the images right, they could probably make it work as well as those who paid Getty to place their images in the past (better when you consider that this outfit has no other costs as they didn't shoot anything).
Seems like a lousy deal when a good image can earn hundreds and a really good one thousands via microstock.
5577
« on: February 29, 2012, 15:45 »
No, they're not, but it had nothing to do with iStock. They posted about it yesterday on Facebook "we had a small bug last friday where some people which were flagged anonymous showed up at istockcharts over the weekend. so we got several mails that those useres wanted to be anonymous again, which i can perfectly understand!! On the other hand a lot of users who liked to be anonymous by themselfs used and looked into the istockcharts on a regular base. IMHO thats 'unfair'. Transparency for all or nobody. So we don`t have a solution or better concept for a "quid pro quo" solution in place as of today wher "only people which appear on istockcharts with their data, can see the data of the others" a quid-pro-quo concept.... So until we have an idea or a better concept to insure that we keep the site offline. Maybe we find a good idea or not. Anyway we never made any cent out of istockcharts, no google ads etc. so why the h**ck should we keep it up... it`s easier for everybody, welcome to the stock 'dark ages' :-) ... If anybody has 'the idea' how to insure such a "quid pro quo" solution, let us know: [email protected]. So just to clearly point it out (to prevent rumors etc.): istockphoto DIDN`t ask us to shut it down (!)"
5578
« on: February 27, 2012, 16:52 »
Your photos are lovely, and I think you should try to sell via the top four microstock sites (see the chart on the right). If you later decide that you want to try exclusivity at iStock, the only issue will be planning to deal with the 6 month wait on removing images at Dreamstime. Right now, I would strongly recommend against planning to be exclusive at iStock (I was exclusive with them and returned to independence last June), but things change and perhaps when you're eligible the answer will be different. I think some of your lighting may give you trouble with Shutterstock - your lighting is fine, but Shutterstock can sometimes be very odd with lighting other than flat bright even white. For what they do accept, the sales are very good 
5579
« on: February 27, 2012, 13:37 »
just a suggestion: if it really takes all this time to transfer data from one database to another, why don't they just transfer sales every day as they happen instead of next month?
(I'm not going to suggest officially, as I am sure they won't listen)
The longer they can delay paying contributors, the more money they make (buyers pay up front; we get paid in arrears).
5580
« on: February 27, 2012, 01:35 »
Old - VERY VERY OLD - thread alert
5581
« on: February 25, 2012, 18:42 »
336 (of 2500+) images from my portfolio are now on Thinkstock/photos.com. For ages it was stuck at 25, and this last week it's seen several batches added, all old images (2004-2006). The first 25 were a mix of ages. I'm not submitting to iStock at the moment, so there's no new content even if they wanted to include it.
5582
« on: February 25, 2012, 15:40 »
the site does look awesome, pretty cool place to show your work but the 2.99$ seem very very cheap :/
Yes but that is a one time HD DL for personal use.
I looked at the site, read the rather brief personal use license ([ur=http://500px.com/terms/download_license.pdfl]here[/url]). Seems to me that there is no way that you could ever police this. It's bad enough with the micros, but here you're not even selling to another business. I think for people who have stuff on Flickr and might like to sell one or two, this seems like a fine idea. For anyone who actually has microstock income, (i.e. you have something to lose if people buy a full size image for $2.99 and then use it commercially) I can't see much upside (prices are too cheap and I don't see a huge new audience this site brings to the table) and there's a big potential downside.
5583
« on: February 24, 2012, 20:08 »
Regarding the best match "tweaking", I think it's working as well as the rest of the site, which is to say not very well. I think if you get your algorithm right, you don't change the best match at all, but what gets displayed does change as files sell, age, and new ones are added. Those factors are all taken into account when figuring out how to display search results.
I think their desire to try and maximize profit out of a system that was originally about trying to present the best results to the buyer is the major factor in them having totally messed up best match. The other is that their software engineers suck.
5584
« on: February 24, 2012, 20:04 »
The URL for looking at the queue size (some admin posted this when they took the number of files in queue away from the front page a few years back) is http://www.istockphoto.com/statsI don't know what the number includes, but I'm sure that the bulk of it is photos even if it does include other media
5585
« on: February 24, 2012, 13:39 »
I try not to think about what Lobo thinks or means - it hurts my head But I think he was saying that the issue had come to as much of a conclusion as it was ever going to - contacting support and having to put up with their non-answer.
5586
« on: February 24, 2012, 13:32 »
That re-instated thread is talking about whether people will upload in the current environment, and for good reasons, a number of posters there are saying they'll hold off.
When you look at the files in the queue - 32,812 - I guess that's why the number's so low. I thought 40K or so from a few months back was low - it was frequently at 90K when things were busy.
5587
« on: February 24, 2012, 13:20 »
Oh Lordy yes! I think 45 cents or thereabouts happens (my personal low is 48 cents, but I almost never bother to check any more). See here for some numbers
5588
« on: February 24, 2012, 01:08 »
I checked 7-10, but I don't upload everything, regularly, to all of them. If an agency can't manage to make regular sales out of 500 files that I know sell, then I don't bother uploading more - Pixmac is in that category, for example. BigStock is too, but I had assumed I'd see sales at a similar level to what I had in the past there, and that meant I uploaded about 1,200 images there, but am not uploading more as it's a waste of time, IMO. I don't try every new site, but I am on the lookout for something that may end up toppling the current crop of bloated, greedy agencies that are overdue for their comeuppance I had hopes for PhotoDune, but it slowed down a lot after the initial surge of sales. I had hopes for Stockfresh because of Peter's track record, but sales are so slow I don't see any reason to upload more.
5589
« on: February 23, 2012, 18:15 »
I almost always have a ton of images that I've shot but never had time to process. I go and find those if I don't have anything lined up to shoot. Another thing is find something new to learn in Photoshop, Illustrator, camera technique if I already have the gear, and work through some tutorials. Very often some inspiration comes from that - as long as you let yourself just learn, vs. obsess about thinking of a stock image you can make with it.
For lifestyle work, even without models there are useful shots of settings that you might fill out your other work with - particularly if you use the same props and sets as a model session used.
5590
« on: February 23, 2012, 11:18 »
This morning my missing images showed up - it took them three days to fix this. I agree that those sorts of smooth vague phrases aren't the best for making me feel confident, especially as this has apparently happened before.
5591
« on: February 22, 2012, 10:46 »
Sorry, but neither of those shots are even close - composition, focus, exposure and white balance problems in both.
5592
« on: February 22, 2012, 10:42 »
Right up there with Logos - planned but no dates, no visible activity. I don't suppose they'll come out and say they've dropped the idea, but the last time someone asked, they said they were working on it.
5593
« on: February 22, 2012, 10:36 »
Support replied to my ticket late last night. Known bug, working on it, sorry for any inconvenience it may cause.
Not happy, but not sure what else do to. If the scuttlebutt is true that the big bosst for new files is no longer in place, perhaps it won't hurt so much that after a few hours and a couple of sales the batches vanished for a week...
5595
« on: February 21, 2012, 15:16 »
...After a few years, it's clear to you that 20 of those vendors are supplying products that fly off the shelves, and the other 80 are giving you products that don't sell very well, and frankly, are taking up space on the shelves. ... if you were the store owner in this scenario, you simply wouldn't carry the stuff that doesn't sell. Those non-selling vendors would be history.
The flaw in the analogy is that the non-Yuri non-"fly off the shelves" suppliers are not providing you with the same products (ignoring for the moment that some lazy bums are just trying to copy what sells but not doing as good a job of it). The reason you want to have product from other than the 20 vendors who sell in high volume is that you want to serve the full range of buyer's image needs which will often mean one of the happy-smiling-standard stock images and sometimes mean a shot of a fish market in a small town or a landmark in a particular tourist destination, or... There are several places you can read about how fed up buyers are with the look-alike sameness of what they can now buy as stock. Dump the 80 "non-sellers" from your mythical store and you'll speed up the process of buyers finding somewhere else to shop because they can't get what they want from you. 123rf is rewarding the volume sellers. Saying "top" suggests other good attributes beyond sales volume. There's tons of quality stuff that doesn't sell in volume (like almost all of Getty's top end RM content). Mass market sellers (which are generally of highest technical quality; I'm not suggesting they're not a quality product) that look like they came from where they did - a factory - probably won't last very long as a business strategy. So possibly in the long run 123rf dumping those of us in the 80 group is really doing us a favor by forcing us to find other outlets?
5596
« on: February 21, 2012, 13:00 »
.... I still only have about 5% of my port transferred to the PP although it is weeks/months since they made it 'mandatory' for independents. Heigh-ho.
Over the weekend and yesterday I jumped from 25/2500 to 193/2500 - all old stuff (the 25 were all over the map in terms of age of the file). Perhaps they're getting serious about transferring the files, finally.
5597
« on: February 20, 2012, 16:12 »
So I had some images approved, after a wait, over the weekend. This morning, one of them sold, but now those images have disappeared from my active image list, count and gallery. I guess they'll show up again..
5598
« on: February 20, 2012, 15:45 »
Unlike SS and DT, several other sites make you explicitly process your FTP uploads. PD, 123rf, Veer, Stockfresh all do that - and I really don't know what the point is.
Once you have enough files uploaded and approved, remember to use 123rf's "Fave" process to give a search engine boost to a subset (I think it's 5%) of your portfolio.
5599
« on: February 20, 2012, 14:30 »
As far as I know there are no upload limits on 123rf, so upload away.
I've never checked on things showing up in my portfolio on 123rf, so I have no idea about delays, but I would assume there are as every site has moved away from things showing up in real time. And yes, reviews can take a week or more, but it's highly variable.
5600
« on: February 20, 2012, 14:26 »
Thanks for your insightful post jsnover.
If you want to, you can easily check the number of files in your port back than, at IS in your UL section and at SS in status of submitted photos/approved photos. But you don't have to be so exact, the numbers you've put out paint a pretty good picture 
You can't easily, though I realize I could get a reasonable approximation. You'd have to account for disabled images, for example, which is what I used to do for anything sent to the dollar bin in the IS case, and adding up all the batches on SS (which as I often did things in small batches would be a pain).
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