Quote from: SNP on January 18, 2012, 12:16

makes me sad. I have truly loved iStockphoto as it was.

"I have truly loved" ? Do me a favour. It was supposed to be your agency and you should have maintained a business relationship with them.

There's what you were supposed to be doing and what you actually do. I completely get the emotional attachment - and I was never a pom-pom carrier.

I think that at its very best, a successful business, particularly one that is changing how things are done, is a very exciting and engaging thing. On top of which there are a number of really wonderful contributors who were active participants in the supplier side of the community. I don't think that was illusory, even though it is now largely gone (wholly gone for me and the forums are  heading for ghost towns compared to what they once were).

Call me foolish (and Douglas Freer suggested I was in need of psychiatric counseling for going exclusive!) but I was at one time very engaged with being part of the business and its growth and success. It felt like a partnership. Perhaps I just saw what I wanted to see. At any rate, I get the attachment thing (wouldn't have called it love, but that's just a quibble).

..., or do I really have to give a reason in the box for every file?? This is certainly frustrating...

You really do have to give a reason - you can paste something into each one to save time.

It is frustrating, but several other sites are similarly painful if you want to deactivate images vs. close an account completely. I guess no site wants to optimize the experience for users removing content en masse

You can contact support (I think you just have to check the box that says you've looked at the Wiki to get the ticket to be sent). There are also forums (and admins do help people with problems out).

I obviously have a big stake in the reasonable protections for copyright holders so our work isn't pirated.

However, SOPA and the Senate parallel are terrible legislation and should not be passed. The problem is that there's a requirement to take down on the basis of an allegation - think of how that allows malicious takedown - and that an industry group gets to administer it (the worst kind of privatizing government, IMO).

Just because there is clearly a piracy problem does not make every piece of legislation advisable.

The zip file is a pain, but it's only for the initial approval. FTP for everything else and a reasonable system (not great, but workable) for MR and PR: you need to FTP all the releases for a given FTP batch into a Model Releases sub-folder, then the files themselves in the parent directory. They are fine when you have a mix of files, not all of which need all the releases.

Some of the keyword pains have already been mentioned - that you don't get a count of how much you're over by if you're over 50 by their count. I say by their count because I had a file with 48 keywords (counted by SS's upload process), but some of the keywords were multi-word ones. PD counts words, not comma-separated items, so it complained I was over 50. I just deleted some of the less important keywords until it was happy. In this case it was a composite with a grungy window with four season views - sometimes you need a lot of keywords depending on what's in the image.

The other keyword pain is that it won't accept certain punctuation or numbers by themselves. I have some older images with 50 as a keyword - newer ones I have 50s and fifties. I had over a hundred in one batch where I had to edit one by one - there's no batch editing (someone from PD should sit over the shoulder of a SS contributor to see how this should be done).

I would definitely give PD a try. They're making an effort to improve things; the site is bringing in regular sales and in spite of the relatively low prices (I have opted out of extended licenses as I think their pricing on that is way out of line) my return per download is $1 (give or take a few cents either way). That's higher than DT (although the volume of sales right now is lower)

Lobo promised that if someone closes their account, they can claim a payout even if it's below $100.

I don't think the contract requires them to do that, and as you know the contract says something to the effect that anything outside that contract isn't binding. IOW statements in the forum are worthless.

I'd be concerned with a "that was true then, but no longer" or inability to deliver on something outside of the well-worn automatic mechanisms for requesting payment.

Quote from: jsnover on January 11, 2012, 10:40

So what's the point of edstock2? Why have two accounts not one?
...

My conspiracy theories on "The point of edstock2"

1) The site code probably can't handle a single contributor having more than 90,000 images without crashing
2) There must be a limit to how many photos a single contributor can have upfront on any single search. spreading them across multiple accounts means they can provide the customers with even more horrible photos and push indies even futher backwards.

As edstock is now at 104,213 files (not all of which show up in a search, so some must be very recent), I think reason one is ruled out, which leaves reason 2 as a plausible explanation. There is still the price difference as another differentiator.

Take a look at this example; I think it illustrates what can go wrong if you resave JPEGs and use level 8 (worse if lower).

If you look at each of the copies it represents what would happen if you cloned something from the original, saved the file as a level 8 JPEG, then opened it up later, cloned again, and so on. The data you're cloning has been altered by the save and re-open, and then you subjected it to the same artifact-creating compression process.

If you look at 300% or 400% it is easiest to see, and look at the bloom along the bottom blue edge as well as around the flower stalks.

When I did the experiments saving at level 10 things were much less pronounced, so I did these at level 8, the lowest of the high-quality settings. I think the big takeway would be to save at the highest quality all the time while editing and you'll probably be OK.

I didn't know there was an earlier version. I wonder if it is on DVD.

I didn't know there was a later one

There's a thread in the IS forums about large groups of refunds that some contributors are seeing recently. I have not seen many (one on Jan 4th), and other than the e-mail giving month and day but no year for the original download, nothing seemed amiss. It was a sale on Dec 26th and as things had been so horribly slow I remembered seeing the image in the list of sales, so I believe it was Dec 26th 2011.

Sean had a sale on a future date referred to in a refund e-mail - clearly they're at a minimum having trouble with the proces of sending out refund e-mails: "This is in reference to the file downloaded on 16/08/2012 in the amount of $ 0,58 ." Even if you account for month/day day/month issues, that date is future.

My text had the date this way "This is in reference to the file downloaded on Dec 26   ,in the amount of $ 2.60." Why would the date format be different?

Sodafish reported his recent rash of refunds totalled $280.

So they remove the original sale leaving no record of what originally happened. They send out malformed e-mails and list possible reasons for the refund, saying : "due to the high volume of daily transactions, we will be unable to provide additional clarification on the refund performed"

I have to believe this is all incompetence and bad software, but with so little in the way of detailed reports, plus a track record of messing up payments (the EL reimbursements) it's hard to have any confidence in what they're doing with our money.

When you think you've become comfortable with your camera and have covered the basics of getting shots well composed, well exposed and in focus, take a look at the stock sites and see if you think you can produce images of the sort people buy for stock. If you do, then you can start on the learning curve and see how you do. Your new camera is perfectly adequate to get you started in stock, if you decide to do that.

And there's plenty to read here about the business end of it (less about the nuts and bolts of photography) - welcome

Quote from: BaldricksTrousers on December 30, 2011, 17:11

Even if they have succeeded in pushing customers into paying more per download to compensate for falling sales, is it possible to imagine that next year they can repeat the trick?

And then do the same the next year and the one after?

This is where it is correct to use the word "unsustainable". You cannot endlessly increase prices to outpace a fall in sales, though maybe hiding the independent content is part of an attempt to do that.

I see it the opposite way. Increasing prices are the cause of falling sales. But I could care less about download numbers if my overall revenue is up...I wish we had some info on whether it's up or down site-wide.

What you would like to see - given a variety of collections at a variety of price points - is that you keep the volume of business on the items that are at the lower prices and only have lower volumes on the high price collections (Vetta, Agency, exclusive+). You'd aim to grow the business overall by adding buyers for the higher priced content, not losing existing buyers in the process.

The problem, IMO, is that iStock managed to lower the volume of sales on the lower priced items because of the way they were pushing the higher priced ones. That's not growing the business. The temptation to "solve" the problem by pushing more of the higher priced stuff just accelerates the spin.

The fact that the site is frequently not working as it should just exacerbates the problems - frustrated buyers may find that the final straw in deciding to shop multiple places or leave when their credits are used. I saw another buyer post in the iStock forums this week, deleted not long after it appeared, where they said they were going to use up their credits and shop elsewhere thereafter. I don't spend much time in the iStock forums so it was just happenstance I saw it.

I think it's tempting for those whose income is currently OK at iStock to dismiss the reports of others (such as in the Dec sales thread and the 2011 sales thread) about drastically falling sales. Neither iStock or Getty is going to share any real information with contributors, so we inevitably have to read things into the data we can gather. If H&F is looking for growth in income, there's only so long iStock can deliver by cutting contributor payouts to a portion of their suppliers and dumping wholly owned content from Getty onto the site.