SS threads are crazy. Some posters there have 3-4000 posts. I wonder when they make pictures.

I submit to at least 50 sites.
File sizes total a few petabytes.
I bought a brand new black Hasselblad.
I gave it away, it was just a fad...

Ever considered to be ghostwriter for Eminem? ;-)

Did they ever announce anything...

Fotolia always makes me think of the final line of Cool Hand Luke (Paul Newman):
"What we've got here is a failure to communicate."

A client of mine subscribe to a stocksite called Colourbox. (www.colourbox.com) I've never heard about it before and haven't seen anything about it in this forum either.

Considering you are a new member and this is your very first post, would it be too bold to assume that you are connected with this Danish site? 
It is out now by the way. Even Cubestat.com can't connect. Traceroute takes ages. Is it on a garage server or on a mainstream hoster?

Looking for some advice on new software. Bridge has constantly crashed since I upgraded to CS3, and I need to find a replacement. I like the RAW editor in CS3 and am happy with Photoshop, but Bridge has become unusable.

Before jumping to conclusions, you can try CS4. The full functioning version works for 30 days. The RAW is much better than CS2 and even CS3. You might just check if your bugs are still there.
Ranking and slideshows are already standard in the Vista File manager.

I've been reading about SS and IS but want to build the portfolio and work my way up to that level.  Is 123 a good stepping stone?

123RF is one of those nice quiet low-maintenance sites with no catgeories, easy upload, no drama, and the fastest and best MRF attach module around. Some months they are almost the same as DT, some months just 1/5th of DT. Their FTP upload is flawless, the import fast. They automatically pay out by PayPal whenever you reach 50$. You can give a fraction of your port a boost in the search engine by adding them to your favorites. 123RF is a go by all means, since upload virtually doesn't take time, and it's just an extra tab in the Filezilla site manager.

- Address the search engine breakdown by new keywording standards:

a - maximum 20 keywords in order of importance; search algorithm takes this weight into account;
b - 3 classes of keywords: [1] the usual one, [2] a conceptual one (maximum 5) that will replace categories, and [3] for travel/landmarks/editorial the exact location/sublocation/country (with geopos) that can be extracted from the IPTC field (YAY does this for the country).

For SS only: use the short title and not the long description as image title.

- Model Release key embedded in the metadata (Adobe is working on an extended IPTC standard that allows it).

- Abolishment of categories.

- Introduction of support for a unique PID or picture identification number like the ISBN embedded in the EXIF and generated by the cam.

Finally, I could see the "peopless" searches being handy.

I'm currently using "nobody" for person-less shots, "person, one" and "person, two" for 1-2 people, and "people" only for crowds or more than two persons. I think that iStock introduced that convention.

It's fun to look at Dreamstime on the wayback machine.

In 2001. Distributing your Dream CD with images.

Somewhere in 2003 they disappeared to resurface in july 2003 anouncing a brand new concept. The logo was still a film roll.

Dreamstime will re-open soon along with a brand new concept.
Photographers and designers using film or digital equipment will be enabled to sell their portfolio of images online. Our new concept is based on creating a powerful photo community, providing royalty free images and royalty free stock imagery or photos to DTP designers, web designers, photos for printing brochures, advertisements, magazine or newspaper ads, and electronic use on websites and Flash interactive animations.
We're looking for photographers and designers!

The rebranding took a long time, and Dreamstime as we know it opened on March 9, 2004 with 25 photographers listed on the front page.

Around July 2004 they already had 200 photographers.

Statistics October 2004:
Online files: 19296
Users: 3923
Photographers: 487

Statistics end of 2004:
Online files: 31388
Users: 7006
Photographers: 767

On March 5, 2005, the spiral logo first appeared as a dot on the i of Dreamstime.
Photoshow has 367 images online, and Andresr 601. Online files: 44656.

On April 13, 2005 the homepage was much (too?) simplified for non-logged in visitors. 55,204 images online.

July 1, 2005 has 81,599 images online.

I joined August 3, 2005 when there were 94,091 images live.

End of 2005 there were already 211,847 images online, more than 100,000 added in 4-5 months. Everybody seems to discover microstock.

End of 2006 gave 861,473 images, 600,000 added in one year. That's around the time LuckyOliver and Featurepics started, not realizing the first mice got the cheese already. Milestones can be followed from now on in the DT milestones thread on Dreamstime itself. Over 10,000 images are added per week.

End of 2007, 2,149,835 images online, 1,300,000 added in one year.

One year ago, 4 months later (April 1, 2007), there were 2,680,851 images online.

End of 2008, Tangie said: "we reached 4,500,000 images online only a year after announcing the first million". Actually, from end 2007 to end of 2008, 2,350,000 images were added.

End February 2009 was the 5 million milestone, less than 2 months after the 4,5 million. Extrapolating this over 2009 would give 3,000,000 images added in one year, and 8,000,000 images online end of 2009, 10,000,000 somewhere late Q1 in 2010.

My bet is that DT won't count photographers around 2020 any more in absolute numbers but in % of the world population with about 100 billion images online. 

I'm with you hoi ha 100%, if I'm looking for a photo of a cow, that's what I spec to find in my search as a buyer..

Spam works as a detracting and flagging factor. If spam (as all blatant commercials we have to endure in daily life) didn't work, nobody would use it.

On DT I observed that 50% of my images is downloaded without any relevant search terms. That means buyers rely heavily on visual search and start to browse around till some image catches their eyes as totally fit to what they need. Fitting your needs and what you want is not to objectivate in keywords totally. Seeing still is believing and you might end up (at least I did sometimes) with an image you weren't looking for in the first place.

We all experience this phenomenon when setting off to a journey to a mall to look for a tripod and we came home with this totally cool PC gadget. Window shopping, getting detracted, browsing and finding something cool and neat we weren't looking for in the first place is one of the rules of shopping. It's even true in commodity shopping. Who claims going out to the food supermarket and sticking 100% to his shopping list?

Out of sheer interest, I made a blogpost a few years ago about search strategies, keywords and number of images. That was the time that DT had about one million images online. It's a bit of math and I won't repeat it here but if you make a few assumptions like a set of M equivalued keywords per image and a search based on one or two keywords, the strategy will break down from N = 3 million images on. That means you'll get many hundreds or more of search results. The spam is obviously a disturbing factor but the sheer number of images is the real reason for this breakdown. Now, in 2009, we already have over 5 million images on the top sites...

To tackle this problem there are basically three solutions. One is limit the set of keywords per image, an approach CanStockPhoto tried a year ago and which raised a lot of protest from contributors. The second one is a controlled vocabulary like done by iStock. Same remark. The third solution is less drastic and consists in ranking keywords for relevance, and putting more weight in searches to the first keywords. Fotolia was supposed to do it. The problem is that most sites don't preserve ranking and rerank the keywords alphabetically. Nevertheless, this is one of the right approaches to make searches more relevant.

As for now, relevancy is done by some black magic. Some sites (DT, BigStock) use the repeat of keywords in title and/or description as a boost for relevance. Also the view and sales count enters into the equation, but that is irrelevant since it accumulates by age and for a buyer, the most relevant picture might be amongst the newest. SS makes newness a relevancy criterion but that has the disadvantage that older pictures (which might in fact be more relevant for a particular buyer) get burried. Also, popularity in se is a very bad criterion for being fit for the purpose of a particular buyer.

As for the stethoscope example, I was very amazed that Zymm would allow for the keyword 'doctor' in an image of an isolated stethoscope. This strategy is sortof OK for a database with a few hundred of thousand images but not for a few millions.

Most microstock sites grew out of amateur photo sharing sites and the key - search engine - is treated rather amateurish. The buyer is the victim.

Photoshop, and not that well either, if you watch the bit of video where he shows the camera with different coloured backgrounds watch the bottom part of the camera grip and you'll see where the outline is jagged.

With only dodging (soft brush) I never get jaggies. I only get jaggies on selections when the feather is set at 0px. You can only put an integer value there, line 0,1,.. 1px is often too soft but you can lose the jaggies easily by selecting feather 0px, then go to the menu Select > Feather and there you can fill in a fraction, like 0.6px. That loses the jaggies and the selection looks very sharp.