Quote from: donding on June 08, 2009, 15:34Any one wonder why they aren't including a 3800px max size??  My Nikon D200 only takes 3800...something..max size. It seems they are missing that size in between the 2400 and the 4800 size.

Yes their sizes are very weird and they left the popular 10MP cams out with 3872-3888 pix longest size. If I ever upload to FP again, it will be downsized to 2400 longest side. That would mean a fourth format apart from original, 6MP for SS and 49MB upsized for Alamy. I'm not sure if I will do that, just for FP. Now that FP is changing to just another microstock site and left its original project, I will probably delete my port there. I need to concentrate on sites that sell like iStock.

Quote from: Perry on June 08, 2009, 14:30It's still June 8.

Nah here it's almost June 9 
The new Messiah Veer has passed already.

.

Quote from: stockastic on June 07, 2009, 17:39This site is obviously a royal ripoff and the only good thing is, they probably don't have the resources or the attention span to go after you if violate the one-year lockin.

How can you avoid it? It's your problem to remove the images, not theirs. All anybody uploaded there is locked in for a year (initially they said 2 years) at least and you will have to send a snail mail to remove the images. Better send it registered or they probably will deny that they received it. Of course it's a rip off, and I told you so when they started. Nobody there is a victim, you could read all when you started uploading.

Quote from: zager on June 05, 2009, 10:39Sorry for this guys. The contest was cancelled ASAP. We're now watching our steps more.

Two months for a reply to your association with a pirate site? Cool. That's the way to build confidence. 

Quote from: Phil on June 07, 2009, 13:09I think it is time that my portfolio was deleted

You can't. The lock in period is one year and last time I checked, you had to cancel your account by registered snail mail to Prague. People that upload to a site with 0.06$ on the front page only have to blame themselves.

Quote from: RacePhoto on February 09, 2009, 22:18Same time next year (or sooner) we can read the same messages about Yay and Pixmac? 

I have regular sales at YAY now. Not much but there is some slow progress.

Quote from: zymmetrical on June 06, 2009, 19:59I would suggest removing the hyperlink and warning people not to visit there in case they ain't covered.

Firefox blocks it. Of course.

Quote from: rene on June 07, 2009, 02:48I can't feel any sympathy with DT. They change rules. When I've signed up there were no subscriptions.

The issue was not subscriptions but lock-in period. In general, when a site changes conditions unilaterally, you can get out at once by not agreeing to the changes.

Quote from: alias on June 06, 2009, 17:26Don't fall out with anyone. Not worth it.

Be nice to all people on your way up, since you will meet them all again on your way down. 

I can't feel any sympathy with the OP since he agreed to terms uploading at DT, now wants to change them at his convenience. He knew it, right? Some people even uploaded to Pixmac when it was clear the lock-in period was one year (2 years first until I objected) and you have to send them a registered snail mail to close your account. Anybody ever heard again of Pixmac or Vivozoom or Albumo with their 400 days lock-in period?

My first year on microstock, half 2005-half 2006, IS made me much more than DT. Then Getty bought it and IS went the dramaqueen tour. Recently, IS got much better with a higher RPI than DT. SS got better too since they changed their feed-the-beast search engine. StockXpert got swallowed by Getty, and Fotolia is basically unreliable.

You'll never know what's going to happen next. Agents come and go. Featurepics turned into a subscription site basically, LO went down the drains. Cutcaster will be like Lookstat. At the end of the day, Dreamstime is still the most reliable site for me, but if they get sold too, who knows? Six months is not that long...

I warned Rahul about this long ago in his own thread in tempore non suspecto. On DT for instance, we had to agree to a clause not to give our usr/pass to third party net apps. Rahul always swept these remarks away under the carpet in a charming way. He is a cool person indeed but he underestimated the Revenge of the Empire.

Microstocks don't like HTML parsing. It sucks bandwidth, and it's vulnerable too when the layout changes. The right way to go would be use APIs or CSVs generated by the site. The real future lies in a desktop app where the contributor runs a program on his PC without interference of an external site with active code, where he supplies his passwords, and where he keeps a database of sales/uploads on his own PC.

I opted out since I have some very good sellers at other sites that don't sell well at IS (< 5 downloads) and I don't want them to be for grabs on photos.com. For the same reason I don't want any photos in the dollar bin. For the rest I'm very happy with IS as to earnings.

Quote from: gostwyck on June 05, 2009, 11:40Any thoughts?

I don't feel that public info on sites should bear any sales info and if such info can be harvested easily by third party aps, it should be made impossible. Too much divulging of personal info on the net already. Not all prying eyes are friendly.

Quote from: madelaide on June 05, 2009, 04:40They are paying 80c to $1 for each of those images, for a minimum of 20 and 15 images respectively.  It's less than credits anywhere, but it's more than any subs.

Apart from all these pricing issues, the main issue is still sales. I really don't care if a sub is 1$ or 0.7$ as long as there is volume. I'm already at 40.05$ at SS today. And I'm still at 0$ at FP since April's payout. If FP converts to just another microstosck site, it should think about its USP. Your idea of setting up a different account for "gold images" only sounds good.

Quote from: madelaide on June 04, 2009, 02:33http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/03/behind-the-scenes-tank-man-of-tiananmen/?hp

I wonder if a flash card would hold out against the water of a flush tank. Shows how photojournalism is determined by technology. Nowadays, the real pros upload sensitive stuff immediately by GPRS. Some cellphone cams are pretty good for news events. China can't really control the internet any more, there are loads of proxies everywhere.

Quote from: madelaide on June 04, 2009, 17:36I am ok with the volume plan they have now, which limits images to 1000pix.

If only all (semi-) subscription sites would limit the size for subscription sales, it would be easier to live with subscriptions. One can ask what volume downloaders will do with many hundreds of maximal size pictures? Stockpiling or worse. 1000px images are large enough for banners, sidebars and articles, and even for moderate print.

Quote from: Elena on June 04, 2009, 04:03More illustrations...
A few projects "illustrations on demand" with very good results
"not enough on the content level" - I certanly agree with this one.

Well illustrations are a total different game. A photo is faster to make and to edit than a good illustration. An illustration is also more free as to concepts that can be pictured. If a contributor has a mixed port of illustrations and photos, the RPI of illustrations will almost always be much higher.

Quote from: RacePhoto on June 03, 2009, 19:18So don't blame the big bad US for stealing your money. Your country approves of it.  

No it didn't. It just signed a treaty to minimized the damage. The fact stays that the US taxes aliens that have no voting rights on their tax laws. The only way to influence the US on this is by seizing US citizens that travel to the jurisdiction of a country and waterboard them. That's not democracy but aquacracy 

To the point: I just set my payout limit on SS to 2000$ again, so I will have time to go through all the red tape ordeal before next payout. SS announced on its forum they will help contributors, so that the physical signature isn't necessary any more. But I'd rather be photographing than feeding the bureaucracy machine.

Quote from: epixx on June 05, 2009, 01:33

Quote from: FlemishDreams on May 19, 2009, 08:25My latest payout on Featurepics (requested 2009/3/30) took amost a month.

Those are their terms: Payments requested one month is paid out by the end of the next.

I didn't complain, just observe. I had the impression that before, it was faster.

Quote from: Milinz on June 04, 2009, 11:27Well, not anymore... SS has changed its search results and now it is similar to iStocks best match... I have mass of old images selling ;-)

Awful Zeus on the Olympus and holy bull's excrement, I just had a look. You're right. I didn't upload since March and I'm already at 40$ there today. We can finally stop feeding the beast.

Quote from: Old Hippy on June 03, 2009, 21:38sometimes when uploading huge batches of JPG to your macro agency you wonder what to do in the meantime, that's why i hang here.

According to the time you spend on this forum, that certainly must be 10-layer 32-bit TIFFs on a 10-baud phone modem  . Let me think, your "macro site" is Flickr, and you are called "Ansel Adams" by the other inmates of "Forest Peace", a home for retired photographers with moderately advanced Alzheimer. "Napoleon Bonaparte" is peering over your shoulder as you painfully type your unstructured paragraphs on your brand new Commodore 64, just grumbling now and then when you break another wind under your white charity gown. 

Keep posting by all means. It's fun, now and then.

Quote from: djmorgan on June 04, 2009, 08:58This will stop me going exclusive, and effect income, any thoughts as to what I can do  

Read the fine print next time. You could also set your exclusive buyout price at 1$ and then buy your pictures yourself at DT

Quote from: madelaide on June 03, 2009, 17:08I believe that, if you ask Elena to set higher prices for your images, so they don't fall in the microstock range, she will do it.

But she has a point: can you afford (morally and commercially) to offer your images with subscription prices on site A, and claim it's a gold image on another one? I never uploaded really to Alamy for the same reason, as it was the consensus a couple of years ago you shouldn't offer the same images on nanostock and on Alamy. Since then, I observed that consensus has been broken.

The second point is how to decide about "gold images". Often we observe that shots we didn't think high of ourselves become good sellers. My latest sale at FP was of an image I found rather documentary, and that was rejected at a few sites as LCV. The good thing about FP (amongst many others) was that it never rejected for LCV. This is a flaw of the LCV-thinking at the major stock sites. You will miss the customers of the long tail. So how to decide about "gold images"?

What FP has to do is think what kind of audience it wants to serve. Might it be that becoming a copy of the existing sites as to content is doomed to fail since that market has been taken already. The blonde beautiful overwhite girl in an IKEA kitchen, the glittery multi-ethnic business teams, those still are the majority of sales in general. Sites that wanted something different, like the Photoshelter collection, failed. Maybe there is no viable market for the long tail.

My feeling in this is that FP tries to play too much on the price competition level, and not enough on the content level, and that goes for many other sites too.

Quote from: mantonino on June 02, 2009, 02:30With FeaturePics I've always had to do my own marketing - so why not get more of the profit when I do much more of the work?

I just don't grasp it all. With all these changes (SS included), I feel more and more like an accountant than as a photogapher. I built my site around FP too, with all links to FP. Now FP as we knew it is gone, apparently because the business model failed, it is just another stock site with subscription. I don't have time to go over all my port and re-price it so in effect, all my shots will fall back on 5$. The worst is I will have to redo my site and put all links to DT.

Quote from: luceluceluce on June 03, 2009, 07:48How, as a Brit, can i complain to the US govt or the IRS? I can't  

Who said: "No taxation without representation?"