Maria, this tax issue has also been discussed in the ProSellers forums and although I'm not directly affected, I followed the discussion. The quoted paragraph regarding foreign income for nonresident aliens has been brought up by other international sellers and that was the answer / explanation given by Zazzle. It's probably the IRS' interpretation, not Zazzle's.
I really hope they will find a solution, I reckon it must be quite disheartening.. 

Quote from: madelaide on February 13, 2011, 18:59
Magda,

QuoteRoyalties paid for a property used outside the U.S. are considered foreign source income and are not taxable in the U.S. to a nonresident alien.

Regardless if property means Intellectual Property or a physical item shipped to oustide USA, according to the above, it is not taxable to a "nonresident alien" such as myself.  Or is there something in the text that I don't understand?

Ok, I will try to explain again what has been explained to me:

IRS considers that used = where sold, under real inventory

Your property is not used outside of the U.S. It is used by Zazzle in California.
Your source of income is only one: a U.S.-based American company. All of your royalties are generated and calculated in California only, so there is no foreign source income earned.

The end-buyers are paying Zazzle for services/products.
Zazzle pays you for the design.

Quote from: madelaide on February 12, 2011, 00:34
This is what IRS replied to another Zazzle member, but Zazzle chose to ignore and remove my thread. Do they need anything clearer from IRS?

QuoteIncome from royalties is sourced where the property is used not where
the property originates. Copyright royalties paid for a property which
is used in the U.S. is sourced in the U.S. and is taxable in the U.S.
Royalties paid for a property used outside the U.S. are considered
foreign source income and are not taxable in the U.S. to a nonresident
alien.

Maria, this is what I understood so far from the Zazzle forum discussions:

The word "property" in the IRS statement refers to your intellectual property (images, concepts etc.) and not the printed products with your IP on them. You receive 100% of your royalties from a single source - Zazzle -, an American company who uses your property to produce and sell printed products in California. You do not receive royalties from the individual international customers because you don't license your images ("property") directly to the buyers as you do in microstock, you license them to Zazzle. In other words, Zazzle is for you what a buyer is on microstock.

Unfortunately, Zazzle doesn't have any branch or production line outside the U.S., that would have changed the facts. The international domains are just mirror sites.

They promised some updates though so let's hope they will find a solution for the sellers who live in non-treaty countries.

Hi arquiplay77,

That's a fine piece of work, my compliments! I would definitely not call it arrogance to try to get the most out of your work.

I had the same kind of dilemma about a year ago after I finished an artwork very similar to yours - a conceptual mini-world. I decided to avoid microstock and uploaded it on Flickr, then put it on prints and postcards on Zazzle, where it brought about $150 so far, not more.

The funny thing is that I intended to upload it as RM on Alamy but never did that due to.. chronic procrastination.  
About a couple of months ago I was contacted through Flickr by a company (toys & games) and after some negotiation, we ended up with an agreement worth several thousand euros and other 5 similar works to be created. The only difficult thing now is to write the RM license contract by myself.

I just wanted to share my story with you since I understand perfectly how you must feel. I personally decided that not selling this particular artwork at all would make me feel much better than selling it as RF and cringe every time I get a max size, sub download. But that's just me.

I wish you good luck, lots of sales and hope you took the right decision!

Congratulations Ivan!!  I'm really happy for you!

I don't know about you, guys, but my entire portfolio seems to be flagged for bad keywords!
I was about to start a keyword clean-up session today for my older files with less downloads and I just realized I cannot edit any of my images. When I click Edit, they all show the same message - "This image has been rightfully reported as having bad keywords and an editor approved the needed corrections." etc. There's definitely something wrong!
I had no comments / notifications on any of my images, 0 comments showing now in the bar. I only had one report in the past for the keyword "cowboy" (on an isolated cowboy hat), which was an abuse - I think several of us had been hit by that person.
Could you randomly check some of your images and make sure you can still edit the info and keywords, even if you have no comments on them?
I already contacted support, I hope I'll get a reply before the weekend.

Oh, and something else: does the editing restriction apply to the whole portfolio or just to the image in question? Just in case I did have a rightful report but didn't receive the notification due to the recent site problems.

Happy birthday!
Enjoy your day, have fun and keep that spirit high! 

I personally like the thumbnail presentation / navigation. It's nice and clean and I believe it allows the visitor to choose whatever photo they want to enlarge for viewing, instead of having them all presented in a predefined order.
What I would suggest though is to create a logo for your name. Verdana looks a bit amateurish Also, the buttons for navigation should be placed right above the thumbnails and not on the top left corner, for a better usability. And last, maybe the main navigation on the homepage should be available on each page, in order to avoid going back each time.
I presume you built this site as a simple showcase / portfolio and not for directly selling your images (you do that on iStock). Therefore, in my opinion, it perfectly serves its purpose.

Actually, after reading again on their site, this is what I found:

"Only you will know if the image or its Similar is subject to any active licenses, including those rights you may have granted when the image was part of Creative Commons. That means it is important that you are aware of your image histories so you can be certain that you really are able to grant us exclusive licensing rights. When we select an image that is or has in the past been made available under a Creative Commons license, we know that in order to protect exclusive, rights managed licensing, we can only select that image for royalty free licensing. We are working on ways for you to be able to alert us to image history, more information will be available as we progress. Until then, you will need to delete from the image prep tool any image we select for rights managed licensing if there is any chance that it may be subject to any active license."

So, briefly, I may disable the images from micro then submit them to Getty and hope they will select them as RF. In case they attach a RM license, I will have the option to delete them. Good to know.

Komar, I agree, I have no idea why they chose Flickr but I won't complain at all 
As for "downloaded for free", that's only for non-commercial use in case of a CC license. I believe Getty only chose Flickr images with a license attached, whether is CC or all rights reserved. For all my images I have the download option disabled, they're "all rights reserved" and the only way to grab them is to make a screen caption which will get you a 500x500 px maximum jpg at 72dpi, pretty useless in my opinion.

I also got an invitation and 10 files selected by Getty but two or three of the photos are already on micro. Of course I would disable them on micro and put them on Getty as RF, but the problem is that you cannot choose the license for your images, the editors do. And since I'm not sure I can mention anywhere to the editors that the photo was available as RF on micro, there's a risk they will be assigned a RM license.
What to do? No idea yet but I'll probably contact support before submitting.

As for similars, you can use photos from the same shooting session as long as the composition, angle, feeling, model's outfit/makeup/etc is different. Once you create your account, there's a guide available on similars (with examples) and you can also find it explained in the agreement.

Hey jmich,
I used to feel the same about iStock but although I'm just a hobbyist photographer and first of all a designer/buyer, I managed to reach bronze and a few payments on IS with only 60 images. The upload process is a big turn off but that's only the cherry on the cake because my real problem is the amount of time spent on post-processing specifically for IS. My acceptance rate is around 60% and almost all the rejections are for artifacting with resubmit option. I never resubmit though, I prefer to upload again on a new slot if I ever decide to correct an image. For your encouragement, I have to mention that I shoot jpg with a 6MP ..bridge camera  *blush*
So, nothing is impossible, it only depends on your dedication/motivation.
As for subjects, just try to have diversity in your portfolio and if you cannot shoot people for various reasons, try to shoot only body parts. It's still better than isolated red apples 
I'm just a tiny little contributor but I hope you can find some use in what I wrote. Good luck!

Also, don't forget that you actually get only 50% of the price that is set for selling the rights (or 60% for an exclusive image).

Cool! My monitor (and my eyes!) seems to be perfectly calibrated 

I scored 0, age 30-39.
It's true that men often have a problem with green-blue hues, they cannot always identify subtle tones. ("Darling, wear the teal shirt tonight, it will match my turquoise dress!" "You mean the blue one or the green one?" hehe)

Great test, thanks for sharing!

PS: Whitechild, you are wrong! IT IS good for the business, it helps you make perfect isolations! 

Unfortunately, I have to agree with Joyce.

I've been having the same kind of rejections - blur for the background of macro shots or images making use of DOF, exposure problems (?) for anything that has not a pure white background, although isolation on white was not at all my intention in the first place and the most ridiculous one, model release required for a box of chocolates (!).

I stopped uploading for about 3 months and the sales stopped too. Then I decided to give it another try and out of 20 images, 5 were rejected with the above reasons.
I give up, I won't even bother to send an e-mail about that silly MR rejection. I will stick with IS and DT.

Except for the fact that they should really work on the dusty interface, one thing that really bugs me is how they process the thumbnails for preview. The compression is awful and any image that has red or purple color palette simply scares the buyers away.

So, until I see some kind of improvement, I won't upload anymore to BigStock.
Good luck to the rest of you!