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Messages - Jo Ann Snover
6701
« on: February 13, 2011, 02:09 »
RAW files are sensor data and don't have an embedded profile. RAW converters digest that sensor data and produce a file in some color space, but you get to choose which one as part of conversion. Some cameras (like my 5D Mk II) allow me to choose color space for JPEGs when produced in camera.
Lightroom's default is Profoto RGB internally for its renderings of imported RAW files, and when you export files (or edit them in Photoshop) you get to choose what color space you want delivered. Lightroom will do a profile conversion for you - nothing will look any different except if there are out of gamut colors in the image. So I always edit in Photoshop in Adobe RGB 16 bit and that's the conversion Lightroom does when I select Edit in Photoshop.
6702
« on: February 12, 2011, 14:19 »
As long as you have a color managed workflow - your devices profiled (especially your monitor) and all files containing an embedded color profile - it's not a huge deal to work in ProPhoto vs. AdobeRGB. The key thing is to ensure that you do embed a profile when you save files (and Save for Web and Devices in Photoshop doesn't embed a profile by default). When you get color problems it's typically because an image is in some color space other than sRGB and you're using a browser or other software that doesn't know how to read a profile. Google Chrome isn't profile aware, but Firefox and Safari are. There's a web site here where you can check your browser, and here where you can see if supports version 4 or only version 2 of ICC profiles. There is a difference in the color gamut (range of colors) that each of these color spaces supports - see here - but it's typically not a huge issue for most of the files you'll be submitting. I have been submitting in Adobe RGB since I went exclusive at IS because they support converting the thumbs to sRGB so they look good in all browsers. Before that I converted to sRGB JPEGs because they'd be handled OK by all the sites. Be clear about the difference between Assign Profile and Convert to Profile in Photoshop. If your image has a profile and you want to have it use a different one, use Convert to Profile. Nothing should change in how the image looks when you do this. If the image doesn't have a profile, use Assign Profile to tell it which one to use. It may change appearance (should look better if you got the right one!) when you do this.
6703
« on: February 12, 2011, 14:06 »
Still $0 royalties on all of my downloads in the last month. Anyone with the same experience?
No, but a bunch of us have problems with unpaid subscription sales (going back 2 to 3 weeks). We've been "nagging" in the help forum thread about getting a commitment on when we'll get paid (even if it's an interim step and they haven't yet fixed the bug). I suggest that you submit a report to customer relations if you haven't, post in the forum asking for a date by which you're going to get paid. The ASA says that iStock will "endeavor" upon written request to pay for content sold by the 15th of the following month. When they were dragging their feet over paying for the EL bonuses they withheld, I put into my 2nd CR ticket (they closed the first one pointing to the forum thread that said "we're working on it") that this was my written request for payment no later than the 15th of the following month. I did get the money, although it may have been a complete coincidence. Can't hurt to put your request in writing, however unnecessary that should be  Don't let them fob you off with "known bug". They need to pay contributors even if they can't fix the bugs. Yes it's work to do that sort of thing manually, but those are the consequences of having a bunch of the site totally screwed up.
6704
« on: February 11, 2011, 21:18 »
If I went to a store and purchased an item, I'd be pretty upset if the store then shared my information with the item's manufacturer and they started bugging me. Lots of the privacy rules about sharing (& selling) that information came about because buyers don't want to be hounded.
As a contributor I do love to know where my images and illustrations have been used, but I can understand why it isn't done. One site - Fotolia - used to do this, but discontinued it some time ago AFAIK.
As far as having a right to know, the only rights you have as a contributor are spelled out in each sites' artist supply agreement. And all of those allow the site to change them at any time for any or no reason, so in truth you have no rights at all (beyond removing your content if you don't like it).
Rights Managed sales will have this type of information - who is using the image for what and in what territories and over what period of time. Perhaps that sales model is more to your liking (although I keep hearing that it's a model in decline).
6705
« on: February 11, 2011, 21:06 »
You're not exclusive, so it can't hurt to investigate. Just be cautious and don't give them freebies - if they want to evaluate quality they can license one photo from one of the agencies and see. What could go wrong? You would be on the hook to deal with any license violations (and you should make sure they get a license so it's clear what they may and may not do with any images they pay you for). If they start selling posters of your images and the license didn't cover that and they won't pay, it's just you and them to sort things out. I'd want to be pretty certain they were who they said they were so you didn't have to worry that someone is uploading your images for free or trying to resell them. They can't pay you once and then "share" what they bought with every other club they know. Assuming they're legit, the volume of business looks reasonable and they're not too much trouble for you to manage (some clients just take more of your time than their business brings in  then why not go for it?
6706
« on: February 11, 2011, 20:23 »
Possibly, but at some point they'll make themselves so painful to do business with that they will start to lose contributors. Especially if they can't keep sales up.
I think I said once before, the worse they treat us and the less we make, the easier it becomes to decide to leave (exclusivity or the site).
6707
« on: February 11, 2011, 20:21 »
Peter Lik sold a print for a million dollars
http://www.peterlikexposed.com/archives/237
I never understood what makes an artwork get so much value.
Creating a brand (Mr. Lik) and artificial scarcity (limited edition of one). It's a lovely image and he's very talented, but also lucky to find someone who'd fork out that much. I wonder if he kept the RAW/negative just in case the print got damaged and the buyer wanted to replace it? I wonder if he gave the buyer a JPEG for his/her Facebook page ?
6708
« on: February 11, 2011, 18:41 »
I don't know who was in the US when Nancy Reagan bought new White House china during a recession. There was a huge uproar.
The PR spin doctors went to work explaining that it was all purchased with private money. It was true, but it was a tone-deaf thing to do given the state of most people's lives at the time - the notion that there were multiple services with different patterns in use at large state dinners didn't seem to most like a crisis.
I do think that promoting the business to buyers is something they should continue to do, but the notion that they're partying (or party planning) while the site limps along says to me that they just don't get it. They may not care one little bit about their existing contributors, or the massively long time the site has been limping, but they don't have to remind me of it so often.
6709
« on: February 11, 2011, 18:34 »
If the crumb trail box worked as intended it has one useful feature that you didn't have before - the ability to drop one search term from a many word search string without redoing anything. Those little circles with x can be clicked wherever in the list they occur.
You could - if it worked - type 8 or 10 words into the top box and then add or drop terms from the box on the left. And you could from that panel on the left remove Vetta or add illustrations, or look at only vertical or...
I don't see any reason why the top box couldn't work just like Google and still have the panel on the left fill up with all sorts of useful refinements (like collections, size, media type, etc.) you could make if you wanted. Best of both worlds.
There but for competent software engineers we would be now...
6710
« on: February 11, 2011, 16:08 »
As long as they don't send any developers and skip a 'lypse website, it should have no impact on their ongoing work to fix the broken web site.
I'd like the staff to wear T-shirts saying "Trip expenses paid for with cash transfer from iStock contributors"
6711
« on: February 11, 2011, 01:14 »
This is just one of the many site bugs. I don't think it's sorted although I do recall an update a while back that caught up some earlier files so they showed E+ or not correctly. I think they didn't fix the bug though, just did some sort of manual update.
As far as money issues are concerned, I have a pile of subscription sales going back two weeks that I haven't been paid for (and sjlocke's pile is 157 subscriptions as of this morning some time). Supposedly we're to see something by the end of this week - but they promised that last week and we've only got one day left of this week where they're working.
You can send them a support ticket just to keep track of it, although they may close it (that happened with a different problem earlier with mine and some others' tickets - they pointed to the forum thread as a resolution even though no money had actually been paid out).
They are floundering.
The basic search problems (type red white blue into the top search box and see the mess you get in the crumb trail box) have been there for nearly two months. They fixed some problems with the layout of my_uploads and about a week later pushed fixes for other things and the broken layout came back. That sort of thing really smells like poor development procedures with checkin/checkout of code and one person's changes overwriting someone else's fixes.
I could go on. Point is that your problem is but one of many and some very serious ones are still unfixed, so I think you may be waiting a while.
6712
« on: February 09, 2011, 14:38 »
Likewise, having worked in the past with commissioned sales reps, they get judged (by their bosses) on whether they make their quotas on the various products assigned to them.
It's not only about them making money on the things they get commissions for (and as I'm guessing they don't get commission, or as much commission, to sell iStock credit packs, they have every incentive to trash them if they represent competition for the things they do get commissions for). It's also about them keeping their jobs. If they do a great job overall for the company in ways that aren't measured by their bosses and miss their quotas, they get fired. I don't think it's a great model, but it's very prevalent in American companies (may be elsewhere too, but I just don't have experience of elsewhere).
Incentive systems can work well, but you have to be very careful to design them to get the results you want. When there is no penalty to a sales rep who sells something that doesn't really meet customer requirements and generates huge downstream costs in support calls, they'll keep selling that way. Some companies started tracking those back end costs to try and put a stop to that sort of "good for me, bad for the company" transactions.
So some of the behavior you could lay at the feet of an individual sales rep; some of it you need to look at the company for designing the incentive system badly. I know nothing about how Getty's system is designed though...
6713
« on: February 09, 2011, 12:23 »
I don't know who loop is, but he/she generally steps in to say that iStock isn't as bad as everyone is making them out to be. What you wrote in your post was very clear that it was the Getty reps saying that, not you. I don't think loop an admin - Lobo is pieman here and rogermexico is himself. Kelly Thompson would be instantly recognizable for his ability to stick his foot firmly in his mouth with every post
6714
« on: February 09, 2011, 12:20 »
I haven't been banned and I've certainly posted many things pointing out the flaws, problems, greed, inconsistency, etc. with various aspects of the site or company policy.
I have gotten ticked off via site mail a couple of times, but not for every post. Things are not good over there, and I find the "thank you for fixing this piece of code you broke months ago" pretty gag inducing, but I do think it's possible to hold their toes to the fire as long as you don't rant or make personal attacks.
Once, I really think there was some attention paid to contributor concerns and speaking out in the forum made a difference. I don't think that any more, but until I give up on the site altogether, I will continue to complain constructively about things that need attention.
It's pretty easy to get yourself banned by bluntly and angrily telling them the truth about how they have effed up one of the best stock sites out there. It's also reasonably easy to avoid getting banned if you want to temper what you say a little and word things carefully (harder to do for non-native English speakers, I realize).
6715
« on: February 08, 2011, 14:45 »
What a muddled mix of infomercial and about 3 different stories! Leaving aside whether stuff like this hurts or helps us, it was just incoherent as a story.
They could have talked about a new generation of technology trying to provide users with a new way of getting what they want in a photo (although I think it's naive to think that most snapshot takers even know they want a blurred background in their shot).
They could have done a business story about how changing technology and sourcing of photographs has affected photographers and agencies.
They could have done a review of Panasonic's camera, micro 4/3, compared to DSLRs, or some combo.
But they mushed all these into one without really tying them together. They also didn't show whether any of the sold photos were taken with the camera they were profiling. I checked on the boy with a fish image they showed - it was taken with a Nikon Coolpix 8700 in 2006. In the US, the largest size (3264 x 2448) goes for $340, but this may be Getty's pricing games, that means it goes for more in other countries.
6716
« on: February 04, 2011, 13:53 »
You can certainly try to get by with the eyeball based software calibrations, but if you're serious about selling your images (as stock or in any other fashion) you need to have some certainty about color.
You need a color managed workflow (everything with profiles embedded and a reliable profile for your display devices). The way to get a reliable profile for a monitor is with a hardware calibration device. And it needs to be redone periodically (although I think less frequently now we've moved away from CRTs) as the monitor ages.
I continue to use a Monaco Optix I bought a few years ago (X-rite bought Monaco) and I don't have a current recommendation for the best bundle, but I'll bet if you do a little googling you can find some reviews of the current crop of devices.
6717
« on: February 04, 2011, 00:46 »
Well, Marisa, I always knew you'd come to a bad end I do sort of get the request to be banned. I've been trying to stay out of the train wreck/car crash that is iStock these days, but like many an addict, I can't help myself. Seems to me that all respect for contributor concerns has gone out the window. If they were being ruthlessly efficient and the site was humming like clockwork, I'd be a bit sad, but would probably adjust to the new reality. But this keystone cops farce is just embarrassing. Now when Leaf starts sending you PMs warning you about your posts here...
6718
« on: February 03, 2011, 10:43 »
To be fair, let's remember that istock isn't alone in this policy of passing fraudulent charges on to the contributor. DT has always done this.
It's a disgusting practice, I've never understood how these companies get away with it ...
I think FT was the first company to do this, and I seem to recall in one case that the reversal was for a sale 4 months earlier. I just didn't see how it could take that long to figure out that something wasn't right. And as you say, protests at the time that no other agency did this (which I think at the time they didn't) went nowhere. What distinguishes IS in this case is how many cases over such a short time span for such large sums and how they handled it (complicated by the fact that they shut down over the Christmas break).
6719
« on: February 03, 2011, 10:38 »
If you look at the reports here, this has been going on for a while - things seemed to really ramp up in November and early December. There were reports from much earlier in 2010 if you go back a few pages.
6720
« on: February 03, 2011, 00:23 »
I am also one of the affected and also surprised at istock taking funds from my account without any notice.
It's not without notice. This is what they said they would do. I'm not sure why people are getting worked up about it now after it was announced weeks ago (though, of course, many people won't have read the forum thread, they should have e-mailed at the time).
I think the fact that so much time went by with no word and no deductions... Also the fact that the money just disappeared and then e-mails (poorly worded) slowly followed... Add to that the magnitude of the reversals with no talk of gradual deductions (after the fact they said to contact CR if you wanted to work something out)... Add to that the complete lack of documentation of the basis for such a vast amount of refunds... And the wording in the e-mail that says they'll do it again in the future... And the icing on the cake is that we've been complaining for over a week trying to get payment for subscription sales that are still "delayed" and can't even get an update from them on when they're going to pay. They can't do that, but they can get money back from contributors.
6721
« on: February 02, 2011, 23:20 »
There's a reason that I hang out over here (beyond the fact that I did when I was independent and old habits die hard Lobo has an account here (as does rogermexico) but they don't get to lock or ban, only read and (very occasionally) comment. It's useful to have an off site place to be able to compare notes about various sites and to talk in ways that none of the sites permit on their own forums. I saw your posts and although I don't see why you were banned, I haven't entirely understood some of the other banees' banishment either. I understand that it's their playground and their rules, but you can't call yourself a crowsourced site with a community and then muzzle or otherwise intimidate contributors into silence or a chorus of woo yay. I'm sure iStock is feeling a bit pressured and beleaguered right now - they've behaved very badly and are getting a deserved earful from their suppliers. Possibly Lobo's trigger finger is a tad itchier than usual as a result. At any rate, welcome to Microstockgroup.
6722
« on: February 02, 2011, 22:53 »
Did anyone see the posts about one of the fraudulent purchases being an EL? Why would a thief buy an EL? Something very fishy is going on over there. Also reports of images that don't even exist being downloaded fraudulently.
One of the site bugs was that for a while all Vetta sales were ELs (after they bundled the legal guarantee when they doubled the prices). A couple of contributors confirmed that their ELs were for Vetta files and regular sales.
6723
« on: February 02, 2011, 20:45 »
I believe the biggest number was sjlocke who had $3,400 removed
The thread on iStock has ballooned as contributors are furious that there's a spread of several weeks over which the chargebacks have happened - only for December. There were some worries about January sales so it's not clear it's over yet.
Given that the fraudulent purchaser was permitted to download the content by iStock - through their incompetence - it seems to me that they should bear the burden of the fraud unless they can get the files back (which I doubt they ever will). They did belatedly offer a payment plan for anyone who wanted to contact contributor relations.
The money went from accounts before the e-mail showed up - really a low blow not to do the e-mail first.
Not to mention some contributors are reporting that the file numbers listed weren't downloaded on the days the IS e-mail said. Given how badly they handled the backpayments on the missing 10% EL bonus (they calculated the amounts incorrectly) and how subscription payments are being delayed, and subscription download amounts are being rounded incorrectly for certain royalty levels, I don't know why anyone would trust that their accounting of this mess is even correct.
So they're taking legitimate money from the current week out of accounts to repay money they claim (no documentation of any sort other than the e-mail) was incorrectly credited back in December. They're also saying they jumped on it, but (a) it was a contributor in the forum who first brought it up - Kelly said on December 28th ". iStocks fraud detection systems (and client relations--thanks Joy!) picked it up when it started happening last week, and we jumped on it." and (b) it kept on going after that because whatever they were doing wasn't working to prevent the problem.
6724
« on: February 02, 2011, 14:59 »
I went to have a read about Mr. King and found it interesting to read the career timeline there versus the presentation in the press release. From 2008 to present, he was a consultant ( Arden Media). He was at EMI from 1993-96, Virgin from 96-99, was VP Marketing at Boxman.com from 99-2001 and then from 2002-8 was at Nielsen. Google doesn't have anything much on Arden Media beyond their web site, so it's hard to say what he's been up to for the last 3 years. He got an MA from Oxford 1984 - 87, so I'm guessing he's in his 40s. MBA from INSEAD 1992 I don't have any information on why he left Nielsen 3 years ago, but combine a step-down job with a long gap, and rightly or wrongly, I draw conclusions from that.
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