|
MicrostockGroup Sponsors
This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.
Messages - ShadySue
Pages: 1 ... 19 20 21 22 23 [24] 25 26 27 28 29 ... 624
576
« on: August 02, 2020, 18:19 »
I just uploaded a dozen to Alamy. I'll probably get an incomprehensible quality rejection and then I can stop wasting time on this. 
You'd have to try really hard to get a rejection!
577
« on: August 02, 2020, 16:17 »
So what about Supertags? Do they matter, or is this just more hoo-ha that was hot for a few months and then faded away?
Actually, it wasn't. At the beginning, there was some 'hitch' which meant supertags counted LOWER than tags. I believe that got fixed. Like I said above, captions are still ranking higher than tags, can't vouch for supertags, as often the supertags will still be in the caption. For a long time in two test searches (unfortunately I can't remember the searches) captions counted higher than supertags, which was provable as some old files somehow had captions but no tags at all, and they were higher in the search than files with supertags. Currently (at least in my limited search tests) captions rank higher than tags. You'd have to do your own tests as to whether supertags rank higher than tags. For example if you have two sister files, e.g. a horizontal and a vertical, look and see where they rank in search, then do a supertag on one only, wait a couple of days, and see if it has risen for that word (and the unaltered one hasn't). Then as a cross check, take another two sisters, select one supertag on one, and on the other, add or subtract a tag to see whether the rise was a result of you having 'done something' with the file rather than the actual supertag. Whatever, their system could change next week, month or year, so ... It depends whether you have a few hours or more to spend on this, which depends how big your port is there. I did it over several days, a couple of hours at a time, on dark, wet evenings when there was nothing more pressing to be done.
578
« on: August 02, 2020, 15:55 »
Since I haven't looked at Alamy in years I knew nothing about their current image manager. So I just watched their short video explaining it. I noticed that every image in the example account showed "poor discoverability" and the narrator never addressed that or said a word about what it meant.
There was a single vague statement about how Supertags are prioritized, or something like that.
I then found another video on YouTube about "how to increase your Alamy discoverablity" and it basically said you just stuff keywords until you get to 50, and showed an example of how doing this finally gave you that green Discoverability indication.
Seriously, this is what they want? Just more keyword spamming?
To be fair, that other video isn't an official Alamy video. But yes, the system is pretty insane and leads the easily-led to spam keywords, which means you might be more 'discoverable' on marginal or irrelevant words, which must annoy buyers. But as their search can and does combine any word in the keyword or caption with any other word in the keyword or caption to make an irrelevant keyword phrase, spamming is just adding more annoyance. Actually, at this moment, one of my 'test searches' (Leonard Cohen) for this is looking pretty clean (at other times, images with Leonard X and Z Cohen have featured high up in the mix), though another (Blue Whale) has lots of other whales with blue sea, blue sky in the mix on the first page (not necessarily misidentifications).
579
« on: August 02, 2020, 10:51 »
It is clearly worth the time to do the super words. I just made a $200 sell Friday. I wish I could make that everyday, but I do get 2-5 sells a month on Alamy. Very fair stock site...
So you are basing this one single data point....a $200 sale... on the value of discoverability keywords?
I think mj was meaning super tags. But certainly one sale doesn't prove that supertags made any difference.
580
« on: August 01, 2020, 17:42 »
So if you have 50 keywords and 10 supertags, you will have good discoverability by default.
That actually isn't true - I have plenty with 50 keywords, 10 as supertags and still labeled as having poor discoverability, and others with far fewer keywords but the discoverability is rated as being good. It seems like discoverability increases when you use unusual keywords, rather than more common words (even though those may be the most relevant). If being in the green matters to you then select your oddest keywords for supertags. I'm not sure it matters to buyers or to whether your image will be found in a search.
They still take the keywords in the order provided rather than alphabetically, so I always put them in my keyword file with the most important ones first and then just select the first ten as supertags. It's still annoying but doesn't take a huge amount of time at least.
You can get to green, if you really want to, by having ten supertags and about 42-ish total tags if you have filled in all the optional tags. I don't think 50/10 without optional being filled in will get green . NOT THAT IT MATTERS.
581
« on: August 01, 2020, 17:05 »
its very cool that Im in the Times, but what will I get? 0.000001 cents or something?
Congratulations! At least you get good bragging rights for that. 
Yes, but bragging rights dont pay the mortgage! All this time I was so happy I wasnt getting these cr@ppy fraction-of-a-penny royalties. Are they still doing that thing where they let people embed your images for free? Is it possible I get nothing from the vaunted NY Times? Boy, is the joke on me.
Embed is only for non-commercial users, so no, you won't get nothing from the NYT. If an image has been legally embedded, it can only be a very small size and is surrounded by a Getty frame, so obvious in use: https://www.bjp-online.com/2014/03/10-facts-you-need-to-know-about-getty-images-embed-feature(I haven't heard anything about it for years, so not surprised that's such old info) The teensy fraction of an image sales are the pay-per-view scheme, which I don't fully understand, but a prime user is Pinterest.
582
« on: August 01, 2020, 10:38 »
I'm already remembering why I gave up on Alamy years ago. I thought things might have been simplified by now.
Oh you mean because this is the 4th time I've had to go and edit every single image, manually, individually, because they changed something in the system or the search?
Yup I only did the images that are still exclusive on Alamy and those that I thought had the best possibility of being downloaded, if found. Some are sets and groups and will still be found, but they won't have the Supertags, but with good, limited, specific words, they are going to be just fine. I didn't adjust illustrations or backgrounds or the "stock" kind of stock.
Someone remind me, did this also replace artists rank and pseudonym monkey business. Where people would play games, trying to have the system favor their best Pseudo and then they would have a number of others for less desirable mater. How does that work? Send your lower images to jail and hide them, while trying to play the system and bring your best images, that already sold, up to the front a little bit.
Talk about a waste of time and effort playing the pseudonym game.
On their forum, the jury is currently out over Pseudos and AR. I will say that at the moment, and for a year or two at least, words in the caption are favoured in search. That's generally a Good Thing, as normally your most important words will be in your caption. The downside is that words which are really needed for context in your image will be searched on. For example, if your caption was, "Crowd waiting for Donald Trump to make a speech demonstrating his idiocy", which could be perfectly accurate even if DT isn't in the picture, will show up in a search for Donald Trump. On the upside, this week I was looking to see what the 'opposition' for a subject I was thinking of submitting. As usual with a non-moderated system, there were several mis-identifications in the search. But at the end were about 15 pics none of which had the subject in the images. When I looked, they were all of the same mountain range in the US, all properly captioned AFAIK, and all the keywords were apparently correct, EXCEPT that they all had the waterbird species and England among the keywords. I can only surmise that the only reason all these were at the end of the search for the species was because it wasn't in the caption - and those who had misidentified it (bizarrely, it doesn't look anything like any other species!) had the wrong name in the caption as well as the keywords.
583
« on: July 30, 2020, 13:28 »
I'll check this out myself of course, but what's a "supertag" and would I have to go back and punch them all in by hand?
Supertags are your up-to-ten most important tags, and yes, you need to do them yourself. It's just as well to do this, as you might discover that when Alamy changed the Image Manager a lot of existing keywords got mangled and mashed. As offisapup says, don't worry about discoverability - it's a stupid thing Alamy introduced which has led to a lot of spamming. And what's the point of being 'discovered' on an irrelevant or marginal keyword? This is Alamy's official tutorial video of how to use the new image manager - and it only has 14 keywords! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DeGewd73uw&t=135s
585
« on: July 28, 2020, 19:26 »
... i dont see travel opening up til spring 20231 ...
Sadly, it could be around then.  I agree with the rest of what you said, stock is a way for many of us to be 'economically active' fitting in among other commitments (in my case, sharing the care of my Mum), where any sort of regular job wouldn't be possible (I can get called at zero notice at any time, 40 miles away so can't make any sort of arrangement for anything). Others will have similar but different stories. I am aware that there are still people who work at micro full time (maybe fewer than e.g. five years ago). Also, a lot can depend where you live. I've seen four or five photographers set up in my town over the last maybe 12 years, and others in other towns, and there just isn't the market interest, so all have failed*. The most recent was trying to adopt some techniques I'd seen on Creative Live to grow her business, but US city marketing methods don't really transfer to semi-rural Scotland! *I see a new one is literally just opening since lockdown started to ease. So indeed, Microstockphoto, stop lecturing everyone and realise we all have to paddle our own canoes and negotiate our own hazards.
586
« on: July 28, 2020, 09:50 »
Yes, although each time you get a sale, you tend to get a swarm of (It's exceptional, I Love it) so I think that probably helps with pushing that image higher. They sell a lot of images of old world war 2 fighter planes in the skies. Probably people like those on their wall.
I don't ever go to the site except to look at my occasional sales so it isn't necessary to spend a lot of time liking other images. Although you perhaps need to do that to get started these days?
steve
Thanks for the info!
587
« on: July 28, 2020, 09:29 »
I put up one (sic, 1) image a few years back, then got swamped with all the 'likes' (I think they called it something else [?]) and discovered that you have to get involved with 'liking' to push your images up the ranking. I couldn't be bothered with playing that game, so never looked at the site again, though that one image is presumably still there.
Do they still do that?
588
« on: July 27, 2020, 06:00 »
Appreciate for your reply! Do you plan on adding this functionality in the future? Automatically marking files as pending /accepted / rejected? Shouldn't be hard to fetch this info from the API and it would be really useful to know which files require further editing and which are 100% accepted (without the need to manually check and update the status), unless this is this intentional, so that your cloud program has more features? Thanks
Even with Alamy, after files are accepted, it's smart to go back in, choose super-tags and fill in all the optional infomation - most of that is actually important! (Apologies if you can already do all that in MicrostockSubmitter.)
590
« on: July 24, 2020, 08:03 »
There are a lot of contributors still joining - they must wonder what's going on.
If they are only just joining, they won't know any better, and SS want to keep it that way.
The forum link is still visible and active on the dashboard. So new contributors may wonder what's going on when click on that link and end up in a dead forum.
Oh!
591
« on: July 24, 2020, 07:06 »
It looks as though SS has removed the forum. If it were a bug even SS would have probably managed to have let us know by now.
Although I'm not surprised considering how badly they have treated contributors over the new rates it does show utter disregard for us. I wonder how they expect people to keep uploading or reactivate their portfolios with this kind of treatment. They don't care if you do or don't A complete absence of communication about it. The least they could have done is to let us know what's going on to save people the trouble of trying to post. You're mistaking them for someone who gives a d*mn. There are a lot of contributors still joining - they must wonder what's going on.
If they are only just joining, they won't know any better, and SS want to keep it that way. The writing is on the wall - writ large.
592
« on: July 22, 2020, 13:25 »
^^^ I think Cathy was being facetious, or satirical, as that's what Trump seems to imagine.
593
« on: July 22, 2020, 11:56 »
We need buyers input on this. Im sure there are some around here, even contributors that are also buyers so hopefully some will chime in.
I dont know how specific a buyer goes with their search but according to Shutterstock content manager (or how they call it) the keywords they use are the opposite of specific.
Not all searchers are the same. Some search terms I see on Alamy Measures are bizarre to me (e.g. Margaret - unless they're writing a book about Margarets and want to see the whole range, but some even weirder). Also, sometimes when I see images in use and try to report them on the 'images found' thread, I can't find them on Alamy (where they were said to have been bought from) by looking at the photo and choosing keywords (e.g location, something specific in the photo), yet the buyer found them. WDIK? It looks like I sold an image at the w/e by unwittingly spelling a public person's name wrongly.  The search hasn't come through yet, but there are plenty of images of the person on Alamy and my pic (with the wrongly spelled surname) was taken in such a specific context (irrelevant to the newspaper article it was illustrating) they had to crop it awkwardly - so I guess the searcher used the same wrong spelling as mine and thought it was the only pic there. The 'disinfectant' keyword is interesting. I'd use it if there was some way in the pic you could see that the person was using a disinfectant rather than just an ordinary cleaning fluid; which would either be editorial or you could make up a label for a generic bottle.
594
« on: July 22, 2020, 05:58 »
OP, drop SS altogether. Don't compete against yourself.
I already asked on this thread but got no response. Is IS (non exclusive) better than SS for you? I can't compare them myself since I don't currently have an IS account. I have seen a lot of people complain about low comissions on IS but lately everyone seems to only have a problem with SS.
It's because people liked iS, then we were shafted. Then the general feeling was that SS was wonderful, even though they were determined to hold prices down when iS was trying to raise them. Then SS shafted its contributors too, so that's the current heavy grievance.
595
« on: July 21, 2020, 13:12 »
And even Trump hasn't blocked me and I've been pretty harsh on him.
596
« on: July 21, 2020, 07:31 »
I find his move anything but sad. He is making tens of thousands $ a month. It doesn't have to sustainable for ages, 5-10 years is enough for him to retire. Actually, I think he already can. He is not doing it for community's higher cause.
How do you know? Tens of thousands a month sounds like a lot, but if you have staff salaries and high equipment, model/actor and location costs to pay, youre not making all that much yourself. People who live in expensive areas like New York and make 20K per month are just managing to pay their sky high rents or mortgages and property taxes.
Yes indeed: turnover is vanity, only profit is sanity. So everything depends on whether the 'tens of thousands $ a month' is gross or net.
597
« on: July 20, 2020, 20:36 »
... My total is slightly less than March and slightly more than March.
spoiler - my total $ is not double March or any other month this year.
That's like one of these lateral thinking questions ... 
598
« on: July 18, 2020, 18:20 »
On a slightly hilarious note I see stockphotofan1 is still banging the drum for his paymasters
https://twitter.com/stockphotofan1
Interesting: never having heard of that account before, I find myself 'banned' from it. Must be a 'source close to Jon Oringer'!!!
599
« on: July 18, 2020, 11:33 »
You are mixing Editorial vs All Uses and RF vs RM.
Editorial files can be sold as RF or RM.
All uses (can be used commercially but can be used in some editorial contexts) files can be sold as RF or RM.
If you have already sold particular files as RF, you may have difficulties having these same files or similar/sisters accepted RM on the higher-paying markets. Nothing to stop you trying to get accepted onto the higher-paying sites with future images, or you could take your non-selling photos off the micros and try to get them accepted into the Macros.
But remember, just because the 'rack rate' on a page says $X, doesn't mean anyone actually pays that much. I only supply iS and Alamy and for sure I can say that's true on both of these sites - buyers are generally able to negotiate huge discounts, or find discount codes online.
Also even on the Macros, just because your files are on sale for more, doesn't mean they'll actually sell at all - you'd need to consider your competition on these sites before jumping in, and try to gauge the buying potential of the files. Even if you are the only supplier of some subjects, that doesn't mean there are buyers for these subjects at any particular site, or even at all.
Some things you can research; some things you can only find out by trial and error. Whatever you choose, you'll always wonder what would have happened if you'd gone in a different direction.
600
« on: July 17, 2020, 07:01 »
I just started with this a few months ago. Bad timing I know. Im with AS, SS, IS, and Alamy.
I've had a number of sales. I get about $25/ month from everyone but Alamy. Alamy zero. (What's the deal with getting a sale on there?)
Alamy doesn't really sell the sort of traditional micro images which sell at the micros. They are much more focussed on editorial. Also, buyers can report three months or more after the actual 'sale', (and the same again before paying), so there can be a long lag. I was on Alamy about eight months and had over 800 images there before I had my first recorded sale there. Unless you are accepted for Live News and work at that full time, it would be very difficult to make a living there as a sole 'tog. I know personally two Live News togs there who are at least 'surviving' on their Live News earnings, for now.
Pages: 1 ... 19 20 21 22 23 [24] 25 26 27 28 29 ... 624
|
Sponsors
Microstock Poll Results
Sponsors
|
Show Posts
