Get used to it.  123 tends to take about a week, and Crestock's review process is best measured in geologic time.  But in consolation, you're unlikely to have more than a few images accepted by Crestock, so you can use all that time to hope against hope.

Dont be foolish!  were all in the same boat, whats the point in deactivating?  youve put down a lot of work, long hours, etc, etc.  What happend at IS,  is the hallmark of whats going, probably to happen, sooner or later with all the sites.
Its not as it used to be, you know, today investors, bankers, etc, owns creative outlets and thats the problem.

First, we're not all in the same boat; we independents are being treated particularly badly, even as iStock adjusts its other programs to at least partially compensate exclusives for their loss of royalty percentage.  And secondly, what happens at iStock will only influence the rest of the market to the degree we permit it by quiet acceptance.  I won't accept it, and I hope all the other agencies show a better long term business sense.  I'm continuing to delete a few images a day from iStock.  Granted, it's still the worst performers that I'm removing, but once those are gone it'll be the small money earners and then the medium and eventually my best sellers.  I won't stop until either they're all gone or iStock's current or new owners treat my work with more respect.

Jim,

If you're having focus problems at those settings, I'd think that either your gear is faulty or there's something wrong with your technique.  A tripod's of value in two situations: when you're shooting too slow to handhold (rule of thumb is 1/focal length, e.g. slower than 1/70 for a 70mm lens), which it doesn't sound like you are; or when you want to take several photos with the same composition, for example to combine for an HDR image.  I never use a tripod for people and rarely for scenics, and I don't have focus issues if the light is adequate.

Do you examine your photos at 100% resolution?  The reviewers will, so if they look soft to you at 100%, they're more likely to be rejected.  Try applying just a little sharpening (the contradictorily named Unsharp Mask in Photoshop); images straight out of a DSLR are generally a bit soft.  If you shoot people, either select a focus point near your subject's eye or first focus on the eye with the center focus point and then recompose your shot.

Good luck.

I just tried connecting with the ftp command from the Mac OS X terminal.  No problem reported.

Now I don't feel quite so bad.

9.6 3.4 3.0 2.8 2.5

Quote from: pet_chia on October 23, 2010, 23:12

If there are many problems like that, or even a perception that there are a lot of problems, then I can see things moving away from crowdsourcing back to agencies using a stable, trusted handful of image factories.

I think the fact that a protection program, or whatever it's called, is now being offered at an extra cost is a good sign that there's a problem.

I remain unconvinced.  It could just be an marketing exercise, a way to both get revenue and sow fear and doubt of other agencies that don't have such a program.  Think Death Panels.

It's not just you.  I too hope we'll see more usable data when the stats page returns.

What I know about marketing is.

Lying, embellishment, distraction and mistrust

Then I'd say you don't know much.

Years ago I worked at Sun Microsystems on the marketing team for programming tools.  A competitor was making a big deal about the quality of their compiler optimizations (which produce faster performance for your programs), and my marketing director wanted us to do something similar.  So I went to the engineering director in charge of our compilers' code generators to get the story.  She refused to cooperate.  In her eyes, marketing served no useful purpose; if your products were good, your customers would naturally find out about them, and if they weren't, all marketing could do was lie.

Both views were wrong.  A story's only as good as the people who tell it, and the ways they get it to you.  And no product is universally good or bad.  It's our job to make sure the customer knows about the strengths and can put the weaknesses in context.  Often people get caught up in features that don't matter, or that just don't matter to them.  Our job was to make sure they cared about the right things.

Marketing often acts as a translator between the people who create the product or service and the people who want to use it.  Those two groups rarely speak the same language, which is why they need us.  I won't say that marketing can rescue a crap product, but the lack of marketing can sink a good one.  Happens all the time.

Quote from: Johnnie on October 19, 2010, 11:36

- It seems that a few of you have been calculating the cents per download based on the available maximum download numbers. With all respect this is an incredibly misleading and short sighted approach. Quite literally nobody downloads every available image. Indeed most use a tiny fraction of their quota.

Why such a high maximum then?

If 'quite literally nobody downloads their full quota' you should have no problem whatsoever lowering the available amount to a sensible level whereby contributors wouldn't end up in the possible scenario of getting the lowest commission rate available at any agency.

I once presented at a user's group meeting for my then employer, a well known PC software firm.  Why, I was asked, did we offer rebates on our products rather than just lowering the price?  I told the truth: that on the one hand, customers included the rebate value when they calculated price, making our products look more attractive; but on the other hand, most never filled out and submitted the rebate forms, giving us a higher profit for the vast majority of sales.  So for us it was a win-win: we got more sales because we seemed cheaper, but we made more money.

I imagine they see a similar situation.  Offer a deal that looks attractive, but that few customers will exploit to its fullest.  You get more customers, but they don't cost nearly as much as they might.  In spite of your assumption that customers make rational decisions, we/they rarely do.

Hey, I can delete and rant at the same time!

Not much point in ranting, is there? If there's any chance of iStock reconsidering its disastrous decisions, it'll be well down the line.  If that happens, and I doubt it will, my port will be lean and mean.  Or maybe just lean; we'll see.

Companies are often successful in spite of their management.  Problem is that they believe they're successful because of their management.  Or the conditions which made them successful change, and they don't adapt.  Or both.

Years ago, management consultants Tom Peters and Robert Waterman wrote a bestselling book called In Search of Excellence.  They analyzed a number of large companies with a long track record of success, looking for common threads.  They found them, and preached what they found.  Some years later Peters looked at those excellent companies and found something interesting: that some were still successful, some were on the decline and some were gone completely.  Turns out that identifying successful companies was find for understanding the past but no guide to the future.

And so it will likely be for iStockphoto.  Looking back in a year or two years, we may be able to identify their decline as beginning in September, 2010.  Or not, but I know which way I'd be willing to bet.  As the financial services companies always say (but we rarely listen), past performance is no indicator of future results.

A mixed bag.  Down 6% vs. August, down 12% vs. September, 2009.  That's not counting a very large D4C bonus at Veer that gave me a new monthly record.

Individually, DT continues to slide, Ftl fell back after a record month, ThinkStock dropped off considerably at both SX and iStock (iStock itself did very well after the Announcement from Hell), 123 did very well, and SS recovered from our summer slump.

SS	29.7%	+15.0%
iS	23.6%	+59.9%
123RF	13.1%	+81.2%
Ftl	11.8%	-48.1%
DT	6.3%	-35.2%
CanStockPhoto	5.6%	-42.8%
BigStock	5.2%	-13.6%
SX	1.7%	-43.8%
Veer	1.1%	-46.5%
Cres	.9%	+19.0%
Scan	.7%	+33.3%