The reason I am positive is that I have had a couple of rejections for artifacts where IS included a snippet of the suspect area.

Yup, in the model's hair was some color bleed from the blue background i was using.
But the snippet they sent was at 200% (I guess to make sure that I saw it?).

I looked at the image at 100% and made certain I was wearing the 150 glasses that I use when doing post (I only need 125 to read normal text).
I could not see the 'artifacts' at 100%.
SS, FT, SE, DT all accepted the same image!

As an aside. I used to grade diamonds (So I was a diamond 'inspector).
Even though 'rejections' if you will, were to be done at 10X magnification. The need to process a large number of stones and make sure that nothing received a better grade that it deserved, made pushing the scope up to 15X or 20X magnification to find the imperfections almost a necessity.

The IS inspectors are dong the same thing.

I'm strictly told to look at the images I process for a serious commercial photography studio only at 50%
but on other hand we all know that there won't be noise or focus issues at 100% in those shots
still I suspect some reviewers do go furher and zoom at 200 and so, I's sure they do so at Istock, god forbid if there will be "made in ....(not visible ending)" on the tiny coffee mug, that isn't even the main part of the shot itself. And they've got to zoom larger than 100 to spot that.

Yup, I agree. For certain the IS reviewers sometimes are looking at over 100%
I am also positive that some of their 'artifacts' comments are found by looking at 200% or even 300%.

Too bad there is no way for the site admins to lock down the reviewer's software to make going above 100% an impossibility.

A little help please. 

I just had a few (50) images rejected for keywording issues.

My question is.... is it possible to just re-edit the keywords in the bulk editor and hit the submit button?
Or is it necessary to go back and re-upload all the images?

Hey people. I'm curious- as a huge generalisation, when is peak, and when is off peak? I think its roughly like this- tell me if I'm wrong...
September-march=peak
april-august=off peak
Right?
Trying to predict if this is the high point or the low point... Thanks.

Well, being slow in the Summer months would certainly correlate to people taking summer vacations. Sc, I guess that makes sense.

My sales are  so all over the place that I have not noticed much of a trend. I do however notice slow downs during holidays. That makes perfect sense to me.

The only positive I can draw from this is that the IS model of charging more subscription credits for larger sizes could force SS's hand to do the same. 

I'm not panicking yet.  I want to see the plan.

I don't see how this would force SS's hand?
If anything, it could be the ace in the hole for SS: buyers can get any size for one price vs buying credits by sub on IS.

IS advantage is their exclusives. These are shots not found elsewhere. If IS alienates the exclusives with this deal, they could be in big trouble.

There are those that say yes, they have pretty consistand downloads without uploading constantly. I would guess that they have exceptional portfolios.

I myself have not found this to be the case though.
For me it is upload or die on SS.

There are GWCs (Guy with cameras) trying to get a girl naked.

Some might sell as stock, but generally not.

Stock needs to fit the needs of the buyers. What those needs are vary a lot, but 'art' shots don't fit the bill most of the time.

OTHO, I have seen some artsy stuff featured on IS from their exclusives.
I figure that is to lure the buyers in, but then they go and but something completely different.

Just an update.

My 'Editors Choice' image has been on-line since 3/7/08 (sorry for the American dating convention) and has had 1,579 views thus far.

And now for the earnings.....big drum roll please.......... with two downloads: $0.60 Ta Da!   


Don't you just love those subscriptions 

as for micros.  the number 1 selling image for istock for the last 3 months has probably made more in this time frame then I have with 2000+ images on a heap of sites... I could cut my portfolio in half and not really make a difference (yeah, I'm a slow learner )

Its always a quality vs quantity 300 great 'stocky' images will earn more than 3000 great 'not stock' images and more than 30000 poor images etc etc

True that 300 great images will sell better than 3000 crappy (can i say that?) ones.
BUT, the 300 GREAT images must be found by the search engine...
My assumption here was that ALL or MOST of the images in a given portfolio are of good to excellent quality. Given that as a factor then where is the 'sweet spot' for making a living at this.

For example fashion/beauty and IS exclusive photographer; 'Iconogenic'.
She has 3,550 files all of equally high technical quality and had over 112,000 downloads.

If my math is not totally off, this is an average of 31.55 downloads per image. I believe that to be a respectable figure.
But of course the reality is that MOST of the downloads are spread over maybe a couple of hundred of her most popular images.
I believe that if she ONLY had those most popular shots, but not the few thousand others that she would not have as many hits in the search engine and therefore have much fewer sales overall.

That is pure conjecture on my part though. YMMV.

I know that there are a few photographers (sorry to the vector graphics people, but that is a different paradigm) that seem to have healthy downloads with only a few hundred shots in their portfolios. But I believe this to be the exception rather than the rule.

So, the question is: What level of files on-line constitutes a 'critical mass' where one can expect to have a fairly decent and reliable cashflow from microstock?

I watched an Alamy conference stream a whileback and they seemed to indicate that the top earners there had around 10,000 files up on line!

Yes, I suppose that I will manage to get used to it...just seems that I need to jump around & do a lot of backflips compared to other sites 

I still feel SS has the most streamlined system and I really like the DT interface as well. It is a PITA to upload to IS, but I have been there so long now that it has become almost second nature.

Guess I just needed to vent. Thanks for the input guys!

Yikes! How did you find that? I never even thought to look there!
Well, i guess that explains the weird numbers... I'll go crawl back in my hole now until I get over my embarrassment