Here's a link to the Agency Collection port for Ingram on iStock and here's a link to their work on Getty Images under the Agency Collection banner.

I don't know anything about who produced the work.

When you take a well known landmark from a well known location, I think these are the breaks. You can't claim plagiarism unless there is something you set up in the shot beyond the bridge.

For the OP, I think this sort of problem is the reason iStock insists on uploading the reference file or sketches in progress for illustrations - too many think it's OK to use someone else's work as a reference.

Geologic time does run a bit slow, but shifting tectonic plates will take care of all this nitpicking about who is a subset of whom. Scotland and North America were once attached. The Atlantic has done more than Hadrian's Wall as a barrier though

Was there some misunderstanding that needed to get cleared up, or was this just a riff on not liking people referring to the US as America? I don't like the attitude or policies at H&F or GI. I don't like them more or less regardless of where they're located. Wouldn't want to lose sight of the bigger point in a squabble over geographic terminology.

Ms. K should be saving her money so she has something to live on when this bubble of fame has moved on to some other cutie pie.

Spending her earnings on lawyers suggests she might have started believing her own publicity. It's amazing what a sex tape and a shapely butt will do to propel someone to media darling Not a lifetime career, however.

I happened upon an image of mine in Google search results and when I clicked on the link back to 123rf, I was surprised to see a link above the image to "free images". I hadn't seen that on any of the image pages on 123rf before.

The link goes to their free section - which I don't contribute to - but it only appears if you land on that page via a Google search. If you search on the site, you get the regular image page, no link to the free section. See a screen shot comparison below.

To me, it seemed that the result was to encourage someone away from my image to the free section, and I couldn't see why on earth that was a good idea - for me or for 123rf. There was nothing in my search that indicated I was looking for free images. None of the other sites (that I saw on the checks I did for IS, SS, DT, CanStock, FotoSearch, Pixmac, etc.) do this.

Any opinions on this from other contributors?

The thing that went away was the 10% bonus for exclusives. For independents, nothing changed beyond the royalty reductions that applied to all sales.

I think the other aspect of crappy prices is very low per credit prices - I queried an EL a month or so ago where I netted $6.93 from a 75 credit EL. Even if you assume they purchased only an XS to go with that (at 2 credits; it was P+), at 18% royalties that is 50 cents a credit.

The reason, IMO, they're offering these insane discounts is that buyers who were angry about the price hikes on the high-end collections were pacified with big discounts. The regular priced merchandise is then super cheap and we get crap royalties. Such as a 12 cent royalty on an XS (1 credit) sale.

Periodically there have been small lags where an account balance goes up but the sale doesn't show on my_uploads for 20 minutes or so, but nothing I recall of the sort your describing.

My sales are posting, so either you're in a slump or there's some sort of problem with your account in particular. Support would be the only way to check that out (although I haven't had much luck with actually getting answers - my last ticket just disappeared but was never responded to).

I don't think iStock will accept these.

The first looks to me as if you added a sunburst into a photo with sky and clouds but no sun. The light's wrong for the sun in the frame. If you did do this in post processing, I'd suggest staying away from that for application photos unless you can do a truly seamless job.

The apple is fine and in focus, but I think the subject matter (portion of an apple with water drops) is likely not going to cut it.

The post processing on the photo isn't the sort of thing iStock typically accepts and a flower shot is already an iffy subject for an application photo.

Sorry to be blunt, but I've had a lot of  acceptance/rejection experience on which I'm basing my guesses.

If it's a reasonable amount of work, I'd love a thread ignore button too. As an alternative, if it's easier to implement, how about suppressing threads started by someone who's on your ignore list?

It seems to it's very unlikely to be successful - it's not the same as selling a product lower than the cost of goods or other unfair trading practices. How do you determine what the fair price of a royalty free license is?

And even if you you were to go after this, why just Fotolia? They're in the same position as all the other microstock agencies with regard to pricing models, no?

Getty has said the terms are OK - see the NY Times report here (may require registration to read).

The blog from an IP attorney referenced in the above article is here.

ignore the advice to use the iStock release  if you are submitting to other sites as well. Other sites will not accept the multiple jurisdictions in the Getty and iStock releases. You don't want to have site-by-site releases; you'll go mad.

I made a variant that pulls from the Getty release and Yuri's. It has been accepted everywhere, but since I dropped exclusivity I haven't uploaded much to iStock, so I haven't used it yet there (so I think it's fine, but haven't had a chance to test it yet).

However, you do need to follow iStock's rules, which are more restrictive that most sites, about a new release for each shoot.  Sometimes people following the rules run into  rejections and have to resubmit because an inspector incorrectly is too strict (typing information into the form ahead of time for example) but that should be rare. Details matter though - such as the dates on which the model and witnesses sign must match - they can be different from the shoot date if signatures are obtained after the fact (like they might be if you got a new release signed later because some agency wouldn't accept what you got signed earlier

You must have a shoot description or they'll reject it (except for self-portraits where a catch all is allowed). The description needs to be reasonably specific - "mother and child in nursery and playing in the sandbox" would probably do, but "mother and baby" wouldn't.

Each agency's rules may or may not make sense, but they set them, and arguing that they're nonsense won't generally get a contributor anywhere. Once you get the hang of meeting iStock's requirements, it should be pretty straightforward after that.

I was an exclusive until the beginning of June. I had been independent from fall 2004 to August 2008. With some experience on both sides of the fence I will suggest that (a) other people's experience won't necessarily match yours and (b) you'll never know for sure where you earn the most money as the industry is constantly changing and you can only know how those changes are affecting you on whichever side of the fence you're on at the moment.

If you look at the June earnings post, you'll see some numbers from me about my revenue per download as an iStock exclusive in May 2011 and as an independent in June. I was earning the 35% royalty rate.