Quote from: Andrej.S. on January 01, 2025, 14:58

Happy new year!

Some motivation for you:


The stone is not the destination or the goal, but the path itself is the stone. Every step, every effort, every challenge we take every day is the stone that drives us forward. It is the opportunity that we have every day to grow, to learn and to improve ourselves. Keep going and know that you are not alone.

one of my favorite essays,'the myth of Sisyphus'  --

"This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither  sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself, forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.�

Camus

Absolutely! Albert Camus is a great philosopher of the positive in the face of existential darkness. His works are like philosophical psalms of the Bible. I loved the interpretation of Sisyphus. Unfortunately, I haven't had the chance to read his other works, such as 'The Philosophy of the Absurd' or 'The Rebel', although the books are sitting on my shelf.

2025 Goals

1. Staying POSITIVE
2. Find a Niche
3. Concentrate on images that have a high commercial value
4. Be nice to others

Nice goals.

My goals are similar:
1. Maintain a positive attitude, even if it's difficult nowdays
2. Stay focused and motivated
3. Find my area of expertise and improve further my skills
4. Make more ���

Yes, it's brutal how AI is eroding the market for classical photographers.
When I think about it, Yuri Arcurs was earning between 25k and 50k USD with a single photo shoot 15 years ago.

Nowadays, the earnings after costs such as photo equipment, insurance, models, props, etc. are brutally low. If you don't have top 1% skills, it's not worth it anymore.

The same applies to Illustrators, who earned really well back then. There was a time when shutterstock had no subscriptions for vector graphics. The buyers had to pay the full price (20 - 30 USD / download).

So all those who take or create generic motifs will slowly switch to AI.

But this trend won't be limited to the creative industry. With intense competition across other industries, businesses will need to automate processes and leverage AI to boost productivity in order to survive. This shift is inevitable and we can expect to see the outcome in various sectors in the following years.

But let's end on a positive note!
I'd like to wish you and everyone else here a merry christmas and a wonderful start to the new year!

Ok, great, thank you!

So here are the results from pixify.io

Title:
Two Hands Forming a Heart Shape Symbolizing Love and Unity

Description:
Two hands of different skin tones creating a heart shape against a pink background, symbolizing love, unity, and diversity. Perfect for concepts of inclusivity, compassion, and mutual respect.

Keywords:
hands, heart, heart shape, unity, love, diversity, pink background, friends, friendship, solidarity, connection, equality, together, relationship, inclusion, support, compassion, multicultural, interracial, gesture, acceptance, affection, symbolism, care, collaboration, empathy, kindness, inspiration, two hands, partnership, respect, tolerance, teamwork, bonding, alliance, positivity, affirmation, shared moments, commitment, peace

Slow week.
129 Downloads / 3.580 position. Dropped from 2.820 position.

I hope the new reviewed content will bring some new sales.

Can't complain here. I have an acceptance ratio of 100% and get approx. 20 - 50 images / day approved.

Just focus on quality and don't spam too much with too similar content.

but is there really this limit of 50 for beginners even for owners who have experience and therefore are not beginners?

and also the tax form?does it follow all the owner's accounts?I think it's possible.

There are many questions on this topic still unanswered,I've been thinking about it for a few months,maybe I should decide and start opening another account just for AI to get started and see how it works.

Yes, there is a limit. I've tried to create a new account some months ago.
You'll get no benefits. If you think that you can push more sales by various accounts than it's not worth the time.
Just focus on keywords + image quality.

Thanks for promoting and pushing AI-generated images.
Although many surreal and creative images are visually stunning (eyecandy), I'm not convinced there's a high demand for this type of content.

From my perspective, it seems that the most in-demand contents are either photorealistic images with creative compositions and everyday moments, or professional industry-specific content.

Yes, definitely. The days of mass uploads, like back in Fotolia's time, are over. The competition is just too high.

Mass uploading only works if you deliver phenomenal quality, which is only possible with a large team, like Gorodenkoff (https://stock.adobe.com/de/contributor/200571845/gorodenkoff).

Another example like Romolo is ipopba with around 5,000 images and over 250,000 downloads (https://stock.adobe.com/de/contributor/205024019/ipopba). However, he is currently being heavily copied by other Thai contributors.

I would recommend diversifying one's portfolio very broadly and keeping it very lean. Per topic max 3 - 5 images and no mass spamming.

It's better to have one super top image than 100 uploads otherwise your portfolio ranking will drop and your bestsellers will also lose sales.
Most AI contributors kill their rankings and portfolios in the long term because of mass uploading.

That aligns quite well with what I said months earlier, that Firefly is quite underwhelming (sucks real alot) and it seems obvious that many customers share the same opinion.

Adobe has invested for sure dozens of millions in researching and developing AI tools, which are surprisingly very weak and which do not offer any significant advantages over those offered by competitors. It`s definetly not the same when Adobe once held a dominant monopoly position in the graphics market with Photoshop.

Adobe's problem is that their AI tools are not sufficiently integrated into professional software like Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, etc. Professionals expect productivity gains that they're not getting any. If I still have to click through 5 menu tabs in Photoshop to select a filter, that's no longer state-of-the-art. It was 10 years ago.

The entire software needs to be completely overhauled to focus on AI with professional results. What's state-of-the-art is when I make a selection in an image and then write a prompt for what can be retouched, removed, or edited with filters (yes there is already generative fill in and AI select subject to remove background but it's very weak).
That's a productivity gain. And there are already competitors on market, who can offer these things.

And Adobe should finally realize that their Firefly just sucks and will suck in the future. They should completely  replace it with open-source AI models like Stable Diffusion or Flux, and provide a cloud service where they can earn money based on generation time.

They should also clean up their stock photo offerings. Introduce guidelines for contributors that are more aligned with customer needs, and steer better the huge amounts of AI images.

It's also time to introduce for contributors the technical ability to create their own series within their portfolios and move away from traditional keyword-based image searches. Instead, they should allow text-based prompting.

I wonder where all the development money is going. If I were an investor, I would also be very pissed of.

Algos shift all the time. The only way to deal with that is to diversify.

And you always have other people uploading similar files. Now with ai they might be near identical.

Files uploaded or being approved at the same time as yours are your main competition. That includes your own files.

You want the customers to ideally pick and push their favorite file up in the algos by buying it or at least viewing and lightboxing.

But if you upload 30 similar files from a series, this becomes very difficult.

So one easy thing you can do is to spread the uploads a lot more. Weekly batches of that theme or maybe even monthly.

The other thing I personally do is I do test searches every day on my favorite genres. Not just to see what is coming in but also when do people upload this type of content? And can I avoid clashing with them by uploading at a different time??

It all takes a lot of practise and is hard work, just like general research.

But it is the only way to rise up in the algos with a small portfolio.

Most important: don't just do ai. And don't just upload to Adobe.

Yes, that makes absolute sense.
The algorithm probably also considers the date and favors current images when quality and theme are equal. Timing is everything. If you miss the window of buyer interest, your images risk getting lost in infinity.


I'll do a test later to see what happens when I delete some of my images that are ranked lower in the search results, whether my better-positioned images will get a boost.

One should take a portfolio like this as an example:
https://stock.adobe.com/de/contributor/202483008/Romolo%20Tavani

Only 3,000 images and over 1 million downloads within 10 years (?).
However, copying his images wouldn't work, as he's built his rankings over a decade. If he would expand his portfolio now, it might probably harm his rankings in the algorithms.
This would also explain how some small contributors can get better results than big huge teams with many hundred thousands of images.

I think the prices for ai production will go down a lot in the next few years. There will be more and more people signing up, so the companies will literally make it up in volume.

I also think cloud upsizing will come at an affordable rate, especially for ai video.

Had a little surprise, moved up a little bit

But  December 24 will probably be 25-30% less than December 23

Unless I get lucky and my spring files start to sell end of the month to balance it.

Brutal, if you consider that you probably added some thousands new images.
So, you have to very wisely look up for into niches and fill them quickly so that you diversify your portfolio. Otherwise, it doesn't make any sense.

Today was a weak day with 27 downloads. This week, I have sofar a total of 114 downloads. I will for sure drop down  tomorrow from position 2,820 to 3xxx or even 4xxx.