Just got my acceptance email so I'll give it a try and see how it goes. 

I got into microstock very slowly and hesitantly and just as I realized too late that there really was money to be made there, the market started to change. I still feel that it's a good outlet for some of my work including a sprinkling of my travel photography (though I have saved my best for RM and traditional RF) and certainly abstract backgrounds and textures which I love creating and which make me way more on the micros than they would via traditional outlets.

I have no regrets about my foray into microstock. Though I started out with Alamy in the days when a $250+ license was common, about a year before I joined shutterstock and eventually other micros, I found that I learned so much more from shooting micro because the volume of multiple daily sales even with a very small portfolio, taught me so much about what buyers were looking for and I've really enjoyed creating concept shots and experimenting with digital enhancements and the like. It's made me a much better photographer.

I think there are markets for both traditional and microstock and while those markets are continuing to evolve and change, I don't believe either will disappear.

I've been licensing more work lately directly via my Photoshelter site as well as through working directly with calendar companies and other volume publishers am hopeful about what seems to be a resurgence of traditional stock photography - though I'm afraid the golden days there have faded too. I'm hopeful that new traditional stock agencies such as Offset and Stocksy and innovators such as Imagebrief will help that segment grow and plan to apply to some more traditional agencies while continuing to slowly build my micro portfolio on shutterstock and dreamstime where I'm still earning a respectable RPI most months.

This is great news! Congrats on your success - great to see how banding together can have such a positive outcome!

Email from Boycottfotolia.org:

Quote

Dear colleagues!

We want to offer our deepest thanks for all your involvement so far in taking part in the protest over Fotolias actions. As a result of your exposure of the facts about what Dollar Photo Club really is, and the important principles at stake, many microstock contributors learned about the problem for the first time. Solely as a result of these efforts, Fotolia finally informed some contributors about the Dollar Photo Club project, added a Profile option to opt out, and changed the license terms to limit the print run.

None of this would have been achieved without you! Fotolia had to yield and the sole credit for this goes to all of you.
It is true that some goals have not yet been achieved, but the most important thing is we proved we can take a stand for our rights. We made all agencies aware that the contributor community has real power and they need to consider our opinions. We had very little time, insufficient resources, no experience and yet we still achieved so much.

As for the protest � it is not over yet. Lots of contributors still don't know about the Dollar Photo Club. Information about the changes Fotolia made as a direct result of your actions and about our next steps will be published on the website.

Please don't stop spreading the word among your colleagues. We need your support like never before!

With best regards, Boycottfotolia.org team.

On the lookout for new outlets for my RM stock photos, so thanks Jonathan for giving us the opportunity to share our work with you. I sent you a PM with a link and a short bit about my background. Hope it's a fit. 

I got the invite too - way too far for a 2-hour meetup but certainly a great idea. NYC is a one-hour train ride away, so hoping they will do one at their new offices. Would especially love to get a chance to share some of my other work with Offset and would love some discussion of what makes one photo more suited for micro and another for more traditional stock, a dilemma I struggle with as I decide where to place my images.

I'd be happy to travel a lot farther if it was a multi-day affair with seminars and shooting ops, and a bit more advance notice to plan a trip.  Kudos on the idea and hope there's one near me soon.

Quote from: MichaelJayFoto on April 23, 2014, 07:03

And at the end of the day, "RPD" is a nice indicator but overall with limited relevance. Thanks to a single large sale, Deposit now has a much higher RPD for me in 2014. Still iStock is making more money in a week than Deposit did in the first quarter for me...

I'd say some of it is about potential. If I make $.50 RPD at an agency, I have to sell 10 images to make $5, 100 to make $50, 1000 to make $500 and 10,000 to make $5000. But, how many agencies can realistically do that kind of volume at the higher quantities? By contrast, say you make $5 RPD (that's $50, $500, $5000, $50000) or $10 RPD ($100, $1000, $10000, $100000). The potential is much greater to make money.

I agree - that's why you really need to look at both RPD and RPI. If I license one RM image for $300, I need to license 500 images at an agency that returns $0.60 RPD to earn the same amount. RM is the better model for photographers in this instance, but it's still a question of volume. Or say you get $50 for every $100 image you license on Stocksy, you'd need to license 83 images on a site with a $0.60 RPD to earn the same.

If you're licensing 500 images a month on the $0.60 RPD site and one a month on Stocksy, you're still ahead on the sub site ($300 vs. $50), but if you license 10 on Stocksy and 500 on the sub site, Stocksy pulls ahead ($500 vs. $300) with so many fewer sales needed to make a difference. 

If the poll showed RPI rather than income, it might prove more helpful, but again, given the vast difference in people's portfolios, it's really not so much an accurate representation of what the average microstocker can expect to earn on those sites, but more a way to see which sites do better, for most people.

It's too bad self-hosted and Stocksy don't have enough voters to get them into the poll, but again, you're always comparing apples to oranges, so knowing that an average portfolio earns $xxx a month, while helpful as a way to compare how you stand vis-a-vis the average microstocker on here, won't really help you predict how well you can expect to do on each site.

The benefit to a poll that showed RPI for each site, would be that you can better gauge how your portfolio does compared to the average, but that would be a far more complicated poll and given the low earners, the RPI numbers for some would be 0.000xx - really discouraging!

Way back when I'd been shooting assignments for just a couple of years, I was asked to shoot an article including the cover with the president of a major national TV network at his home. It was a big deal for a local magazine and my editor was there directing some of the shots. I set up my lights while the writer was interviewing him and shot some photos then as well as afterwards.  Everything was being done at once since this man was obviously a very busy person but he and his family were incredibly nice. His wife had been a professional photographer before they had kids. I got some terrific shots of him and his family but when I went home and processed them I realized that instead of setting my ISO to "LOW" (on my old Nikon D70), I'd gone one stop too far so it was set to 1600! Incredibly embarrassing!

The shots for inside the magazine were fine but he was wearing blue and the possibilities for the cover were all way too grainy. I had to call him up and explain the situation. He was terrific about it. We decided I'd get there early one morning and shoot some photos of him outside - no lights - faster. As it turned out, his son had not yet left for school and I got some great shots of them throwing a football around (which they later purchased from me along with some of the original shots) as well a new shot for the cover. As I was leaving he told me he was glad it happened since he got to spend the morning with his son - a rare treat - he was probably just being nice but I was so lucky it worked out so well.

The site layout looks beautiful. Wish FAA would work on marketing our images rather than heading into the overcrowded stock photo market because these guys are going to give them a run for their money, I'm afraid. Found some paintings on photos.com too.

It's discouraging.

video card came with the HP Envy.

I don't find LR to be slow.  I have version 4.4.  Only a small delay if I let the USB hard drive go to sleep.  My teenager pushed us to upgrade because he does is always messing around the Blender doing 3D graphics.

Sorry - thought you were the OP 

I'm running LR 5 on a two year old iMac with 8 GB RAM a 3.4GHz Intel Core i7 and a AMD Radeon HD 6970M 1024 MB Graphic card - I usually have firefox and safari open, plus photoshop and sometimes other programs and can use the brush tool and all the Nik filters in LR and it is fast. I think the SSD makes all the difference here. I have all my apps on the built in SSD and some photos on my built in 1 Terabyte hard drive, but have lately been running it with most of the images I'm processing on a 4 TB LaCie drive with thunderbolt. I was going to add more RAM but I found that if I keep the hard drives with at least 25% free space the system is superfast. I maybe close it down once a week and reboot, more often if it seems to be slowing down.

I hadn't upgraded since LR2 - didn't love the program - but now I do so much of my processing right in LR5 and I love it - I have over 30,000 photos in the main catalog which is on a LaCie 4TB drive with a thunderbolt connection, and I'm gradually organizing it so all of my photos will be on the one drive, with backups elsewhere of course. I read all the info about how to set up the catalog - what to put on which disk, etc, when I got my latest iMac and have to say the solid state drive was well worth the price. It is a joy to work with.

I was concerned about having the photos on an external drive as I work on them, but the thunderbolt connection is superfast and I see no difference between those photos and the ones on a smaller catalog on the built in 1 TB drive.

Since I have digital photos going back as far as 2006, I got the 4 TB drive so I could eventually have everything in one large catalog, since the 1 TB built in drive got filled up very quickly. I back it up to a RAID system and also back up different portions to various portable hard drives and to my Photoshelter site, where I have 1 TB of cloud storage. Of course, with LR you can have the catalog spread across various drives and it will locate them, but I like keeping my catalog and photos all together so I know that drive has the most recent copies of everything.

Right now I'm organizing photos for a calendar company that has hundreds of titles, so having all my photos accessible in one place makes it much easier to review and pull out potential submissions and put them into a temporary collection.

Anyway, read up on what you should have where in terms of apps, photos, scratch disks, etc, and be sure to keep enough free space on your hard drives, and you shouldn't have a problem. Good luck!

Congrats! 

Direct sales were strong again for me this month. Average monthly income from SS is up 52%, other sites pretty much even with 2013. Also, though not counted here, had a nice print sales from a show last week. Stock photo and print sales combined this year have already earned me just a hair less than 50% of all I earned from stock for the entire year in 2013, mostly due to the fact that my monthly average income from direct licensing is up 400% over last year. Hopeful re: Alamy since I found a few of my zooms there in use when I did my monthly tineye/gooogle images search, which usually means I'll see more sales reported in a couple of months. One was a calendar cover, which may not be reported for six months. Liking their lowered threshold for payouts too.

I earned a substantial portion of my non-assignment income from direct licenses and print sales last year (mostly via a bricks and mortar gallery, but with help from FAA), so the fact that print sales and direct licensing are growing is a good sign for me. Photoshelter is earning its keep.

SS made up <10% of my stock photo income this month.