As long as they are "options" for us, and not "options" for the customer.  I'd hate to find I'm being forced to put stuff where I don't want it.  I get sales from old images without them being put on the buffet.

Given that Getty photographers didn't get a choice, I'm not sure I see a long term future in iStock photographers having one.

Now I'm independent again, I'll probably tolerate them moving my content around as long as they don't screw us too badly on the royalties. If they move anything of mine to clipart.com I'm deactivating it! That site is an insult and the mention of it in the e-mail made me shudder.

I don't have a single warm thought about KKT, and I've never heard of this person who is taking his place. Now IS is just one more pin on a map to some Getty suit. Not seeing much good for contributors in that. OTOH, if they can get the sales volume back up (there were a few bright spots in the July stats thread, but not many) I don't have to like them. At this point it's just business.

I have never seen the prompt when editing RAW files. The only time I see that is if I mistakenly right click on a PSD file in Lightroom. Regardless of whether I've modified develop settings in Lightroom I don't see the prompt - because the RAW file is never modified (develop settings are saved in the Lighroom database)

Is it possible that you have upgraded Camera RAW and that something has changed in how it handles PEF files? (Had you been converting to DNG before to get around an issue supporting PEF?) That would probably change the prompt appearing or not.

I decided to sell through WarmPicture - which isn't really direct, but pretty close.

This is a very recent thread on the same topic - have a look through the answers for a pretty good overview.

I am not exclusive at DT, but I have returned to being an independent after nearly 3 years as an iStock exclusive. I can't see at the moment that being exclusive anywhere is a great idea - things are too unstable. But DT just isn't a big enough earner, IMO, to make it worth being exclusive there. I don't believe that DT has ever had a period of being a sustained #1 earner for independents who submitted to all the major sites.

SS and FT and in the past IS have all been #1 earners for some good size subset of independent contributors. SS doesn't offer exclusivity, and given their business model I can't imagine they ever will. IS exclusivity is still appealing to some, but their changes in royalties and the compensation via annual redeemed credits really changed the landscape, and their many site problems and software snafus haven't helped. Both FT and DT offer image exclusivity, so you can be a little bit exclusive if you want to try it out. Lower rewards, but less commitment required.

If anyone sees it (another watermarked image) again, get a screen grab. That is something that the person whose image has been swiped could use in an e-mail of complaint.

I can't control the rules - idiot or genius - that the agencies make.

If someone says you need 5K images to play, then I won't be playing there. None of the agencies are the sort of long term partner you can count on so making some huge effort to keep them happy isn't likely to pay off. Perhaps the agencies would be happy with only the big factories, but I think the same-y quality of it all might not be fine with buyers.

As far as closing to new contributors, that'd be close to suicide for any site that sells subscriptions. They need a steady flow of new images to keep subscribers happy.

I think standards that align with what buyers are asking for make a ton of sense. It's clear to me from uploading my portfolio to a bunch of sites in the last two months that they have no idea what will sell and what wont. I've had lots of LCV rejections on things I know sell (because they already have). So as keeping buyers happy, not  giving contributors a bunch of hoops for no reason other than restricting supply, should be the primary focus of any inspection standard.

Oops - corrected the typo.

I guess the bottom line is that I think some sort of extended license should be required if the article is to be syndicated. Perhaps it's a relatively low value EL (i.e. I get the idea that the lion's share of the value is created by the article, not the photos) compared to the right to sell the image on T shirts, but it should not be the same as a single use on a publication's own web site.

Then, for bloggers, they can buy the EL or make the people who want to copy their content license their own images (if they want to allow their article to be freely copied).

I did write to Scientific American - their usage didn't even get covered by the above - so I'll post here when/if I receive a reply from them.

Funny coincidence.

Yesterday morning I spent some time chasing up (or trying to) some images used in a "guest blog" in Scientific American online. Same sort of thing - the blog credits other blogs as the source of the images when those blogs are often doing the same thing. Even if the first person pays, I don't think that covers all the follow-on uses.

None of those were my images, but I have had something very similar happen with one of mine (licensed from iStock while I was exclusive).

Mother Earth News ran an article about dumping disposable plastic water bottles. The article used my image - which is great - and apparently lots of blogs picked this article up.

Via a Google image search on this I found this blog that reproduced the Mother Earth story and my picture - I can't know, but I assume they didn't pay for either (a credit is nice, but only if it comes with the cash)

Mark's Daily Apple does a blog post on choosing a safe water bottle and uses two of my images in it. No idea if those were paid for - they're both hosted on Photobucket, but that's where all the blog images are stored.

However that blog is picked up and used by CynergyCrossFit's blog, along with my images, now hosted on cynergtraining.com. Also on Wellsphere which uses the images linked back to the photobucket location.

Perhaps we just have to write some of this blog-copying as impossible to police. However Scientific American is a different matter IMO.

The fact that Scientific American (which does buy stock images and has used one of mine in the past) accepts a blog with images credited to other blog/online magazine sources and then just copies them to its servers, bothers me. The credits aren't even complete - for example the bottle with ingredients just links back to the magazine Blast, not to this page where the image actually appears. There, there is a credit to a Flickr which led me to the image here. This is a creative commons license that requires attribution, something the Scientific American blog didn't give.

The image that initially caught my eye was the bacteria cartoon. Perhaps someone knows who Don Smith is, but I couldn't find a source for that anywhere - tons of people using it, but no idea where it came from.

I think I'm going to contact Scientific American to complain even though none of these are my images. Just seems pretty shameful to be using these images improperly, blog, guest blog or in any other part of the publication.

Once the Photo site is visible to people outside the "club" perhaps the admin would be kind enough to post that here. I'd consider a new site, even at 25%, depending upon prices and how much of a pain the upload process is.

Veer's parent company, Corbis, recently purchased a celebrity photo agency called Splash. The Seattle Times ran a story about it on Wednesday. The article wasn't about Veer, but did contain the following lovely paragraph:

"In 2007, it bought a company called Veer that handles content from amateur photographers, a growing business now that so many people carry cellphones that take pictures and video."

This could just be truly sad reporting and editing on the part of the Seattle Times and Melissa Allison, rather than something Veer or Corbis said to them, but what an accomplishment to get both the market for stock photography and the type of contributor completely wrong in just one sentence!

The quotes in the article are from Gary Shenk (Corbis CEO) who had some real doozies from when CrapHamlet SnapVillage was launched in 2007, including from this Seattle PI article, and this in About the Image,  the following gem:

"We're excited about also using SnapVillage as a farm club to find great photographers who can sell their photographs on Corbis"

There are also some wonderful quotes about microstock from him in a 2009 article in the British Journal of Photography, including:

"Shenk, who took over as CEO from Steve Davis in April 2007, doesn't believe microstock is the answer, and has instead been focusing on corporate customers."

"Today microstock represents a small part of Corbis' revenues - less than 1% according to Shenk. 'We give customers a choice, but the vast majority of our revenues come from great photography and rights-clearance,' he says. In fact, over the past three months, Corbis has started to see an overall decline in the growth rate of microstock photography across the market.
...
'We believe that editorial and rights-managed photography has the most value,' Shenk continues. 'In the creative segment so much can be recreated by amateur photographers. The key is to focus on stuff that cannot be replicated. The value grows over time.' "

Corbis' negative attitude towards microstock - seeing it only in terms of what it can do for the other parts of their business that they really care about - can't be good for any microstock enterprise under its umbrella. The StockPhotoTalk blog had comments on Shenk's view of microstock growth - thinking he was incorrect about the industry as a whole.

So now I'm off to upload 50 cell phone shots to Veer...

Deepest sympathies for all those touched by this man's insanity. Today's NY Times is saying he's a Norwegian unhappy with multi-culturalism. In some senses it doesn't matter what his "cause" was given the awful things he did, but that seemed so sad.

I think P+ has worked well for me, but it's really impossible to quantify as I've been independent (again) for a month and a half and sales were already in poor shape relative to 2010 for the months prior to the switch. When I looked at June sales, the drop in income for me compared to May was just about the percentage by which my royalty rate dropped. What that meant was that the image prices (P+ is the same as standard exclusive files) were pretty close to the same.

If you had a stable environment, it'd be easier to make assessments of the effects of changes.  Even if downloads have dropped in 6 months, how do I know whether that's due to P+ or something else (like more best match changes; the prior promise that it'd be stable after best match 2.0 has evaporated entirely)?