I am not a big fan of the free collections or giving out images to the customers for free. But I see why and how the market goes to this direction. If any agency ever wants to build a free collection this the the way how to do it. Adobe can always surprise me how fair they are with their contributors. And also with their customers! Since a curated good free collection is not a useless one as it is on most of the other sites. Thank you and you have my full support!

I have like 700+ files sitting on their FTP unused, unprocessed. Many of them back since March. It is a half year now!!!! I am completely unmotivated to upload anything new and they do not respond to my messages. Does anyone else experiencing the same? Are they off or what?

At first the royalty earnings looks much lower as they were before the recent change. It looks very bad until they add the subscription revenue what they do quite deep in the upcoming month. And than the overall royalty I get is significantly higher as it was. I lost track how they calculate it, but they send me more money now as they did before so I am a HAPPY contributor

Thanks for the reply! I also create the CSV with a self-made application. And I finally figured it out what caused the problem. My CSV was encoded in UTF-8 (the format they request) but truly it wasn't the raw UTF-8 but 'UTF-8 with BOM' (whatever it means). So I save the file in UTF-8 RAW and now it works flawlessly for me too.

Quote from: arcfeatures on June 07, 2020, 06:47
I use CSV to upload metadata to Pond5 all the time, had some trouble in the beginning, but now it's working pretty much flawlessly (the CSV is automatically generated in an application I wrote, so once I got it working, it has not been an issue since).
The system usually gives you feedback in the form of error messages. On the "Apply CSV" page below the submit button is where the error will appear if there is one during the processing (read every line to find the error). Also make sure to choose the appropriate information in the drop down menus above the button, otherwise it may not do anything upon pressing the button (or it may even process, but not apply the metadata to your assets).

One issue I could imagine is that your column headers are not contained in quotation marks. Here's how the headers look in my CSVs:

"originalfilename","title","description","keywords","copyright","location","price","pricelarge","priceweb","setpriceforme","aspectratio","specifysource","datecreated","containsaudio","cameraspeed","curatornote"

Not sure that's a requirement, though.

Also, perhaps try using "title" instead of the "name" column. I'm not sure what the difference is, but for me "title" is working fine.

Quote from: jjneff on June 05, 2020, 15:39
Hope these help!

https://youtu.be/PCcmm-9qMKY

https://youtu.be/egkFgCS_Kw8

Thanks you for the help. The videos are  good and useful. But I had no problem with the CSV upload at SS and Adobe. Only Pond5 is not working. In the video he downloads the CSV FROM Pond5 what I need is TO upload one - like I do on SS and Adobe.

Quote from: thestuckpixel on June 05, 2020, 09:11
What columns do you use? And with what columns description?

here are the first 2 lines....
OriginalFilename,name,description,keywords,releasenofileextension
"2020-03-29 foodorder_V1-0001.mov","Romantic couple at home drinking wine at dinner table","Elegant couple having romantic dinner at home, sitting at table in living room drinking red wine, clinking glasses, talking. Stay at home concept.","couple, drinking, wine, home, romantic, table, dinner, elegant, talking, clinking, concept, having, glasses, stay at home, red wine, living room, sitting, older, 50s, people, red, moody, indoor, indoors, love, middle aged, man, smiling, white, cosy, Caucasian, long hair, woman, room, wife, happy, husband, adult, holding, romance, communication, positive, alcohol, drinks, person, happiness, American, married, brunette, together",""

I keep trying it since hours now on a hundred of different ways but I am going to a conclusion that it is broken. It never accepts my CSV even if it is EXACTLY in the format they describe. When it accepts my file just nothing happens, my tags are not added to the clips. Does anyone use it?

Ok, but how can you forget that they are not selling images anymore but selling stock?!

Be practical! To reset everyone back to 15% on the 1st of every January is a joke. We know it, they know it. This is what they will correct and say 'we care and listen to our contributors' and they will allow us to have the same model as Getty: last year counts. And than we will be happy and silenced and we will eat the rest. They knew there will be a huge flame around this so they built in a strategy to handle it.

What about the unused credits of the subscription plans? It was an important factor / source of income for the agencies. This made it possible to pay more royalty for a download as they earned, because at the end they still earned more. So fixed royalty was a compensation, a share. Now this unused credits are not involved anymore and the agency just keeps them all?

The new submission is a nightmare. If you have plenty of models and model releases uploaded it is a terrible pain now to attach the right one. Terrible non ergonomic UI design. If SS tries to copy Adobe please copy it totally. The Adobe submission looks very similar but it is USER FRIENDLY. This one is near as terrible as the one Getty has. Huge step bachwards.

Payoneer is the best. I asked SS years ago and several times to please involve Payoneer. They didn't. I asked Payoneer to contact SS and try to negotiate out a deal... nothing happened. So yes we should keep trying but I do not have high hopes.

WOW, I have found the perfect use for 'GETTY IMAGES'!  This is the ultimate word to make your models smile. 'CHEEEEEESE' is the past ask them to say: 'GETTY IMAGEEEEEES'.

I am sure he is doing well, better than us. His Peopleimages is the best site on the market at the moment and he has a lot of wholly owned content there. Beside that he has a top spot in the Getty search...
He just leveled up and he already reached the top of the contributors community so why would he advertise himself here anymore?

1. They keep a "small" portion of the licence price in order to have the best possible marketing.
2. They spend a lot to work with the very best marketing professionals.
3. But they want us to earn more.
4. And they want us to know this is what they want.
5. So very best marketing professionals suggest cut the contributor's royalty in order to clearly communicate them the message.

Ok, it seems I don't understand marketing.

This was a good feature I do not know why have they disabled it. The whole site is a huge mess now with too many pictures. Features like follow helped customers to focus on what they need.

Quote from: photog-teo on October 25, 2016, 21:36

Quote from: NitorPhoto on October 25, 2016, 21:35
Member since: March 2006
How to delete account? Does anyone know? It's time to do it.

https://secure.istockphoto.com/contact_ticket.php

thx. done.

Member since: March 2006
How to delete account? Does anyone know? It's time to do it.

There were times when iStock gave me about 40% of my income. Now they give me 5% of it. My income at IS decreased by 90% during the years. I can EASILY disregard this 5% so I am going to their website and I will try to delete my account. NOW. Why not, it doesn't really matter. No one can be so stupid to sell images for a 15% royalty. Follow me guys!

They changed the rules a few months ago so people can't easily delete their portfolio anymore and now they decreased the royalty to 15% (as an exciting news .  This is so funny:) And do you know why is this funny for me and why do I laugh? Because I do not upload my stuff since years now. So good luck for selling my outdated old images. New images? No way for them to get any of it.  19% or 15% I really do not care.
Regarding to Getty there is only one thing I care now: which song will I sing when they will be closed. They are a pathetic robber company. You know I dam not worry to insult them cuz what can they do: close my account? Ok, just do it! As soon as possible!

Yes, with 27k images I have the same ratio between these two agencies.

These are/were good photos (icons). I can't see the point why should we laugh on them now.  As time goes the trend is changing.

here is no watermark on 500px???
Is that possible? I just joined... not to sell photos, no way, just for the community life. But as I checked there are no official watermarks on the images and people also do not add their own. Am I wrong?
In what size should I upload my photos then? Do people upload full size 20+Mix images just as they would do on a stock site?

This is exactly where the agencies should act  - and do something for their 60-85% share. But they usually don't.
This kind of sites are very bad for our industry. I already lost 2-3 good models cuz of these stupid meme sites.

This is definitely an unfair behavior what should be punished and the images removed by SS. It is 100% clear the contributor tries to fool the customers by this little dirty trick. Disgusting.

Quote from: Jo Ann Snover on June 29, 2016, 22:52
I noticed something today which is either the entrepreneurial spirit in full bloom, or the sad abdication of any long term care over their library by Shutterstock: A vector contributor has started adding "Good Vector", "Best Vector Ever", "Best Seller", and "Exeptional Vector" icons to the uploaded work. And that's the contributor's spelling, not my typo.

It seems to me completely unfair to customers that they have to remove this trash from their vectors prior to using them. It's not much work, admittedly, but it's still rude behavior and I don't think SS should permit this type of stuff.

Not to mention labeling many vectors in your portfolio "Best Vector Ever" suggests you don't really understand what you've written.