ClusterShot has been sold in auction and is NOT closing.

More details are available here: http://www.clustershot.com/blog/archive/2011/february/clustershot

Our (ClusterShot) auction begins in just over an hour. The auction runs until Thursday (Feb 3) at 4pm EST.

We'll be making a post on our blog to update everyone as the auction completes and we know more about the future of the service.

Thanks again.

Sorry we couldn't make it work for everyone. Thought you might be interested in more information:

http://www.clustershot.com/blog/archive/2011/january/clustershotsale

Hi Cricket,
Sorry to hear you're having issues. We're looking into it and will get back to you shortly.

FD-amateur: I'm also sorry to hear that you decided to delete your account. You've brought up good points that we are or will be working on: integration, search results, etc. Some issues, like the fact that we allow users to set their own prices, we can just agree to disagree on. Thanks for giving us a try and I hope sometime in the future we'll be able to win you back.

Quote from: oboy on May 18, 2010, 17:00
Are the different buyer account/plans - pro vs. non-pro? Is there a list of all supported Currencies ?

We have two levels: Pro and free. Pro is 50.00/year.

For a list of currencies supported please see this post:
http://www.clustershot.com/blog/archive/2010/may/newprofeature

We just added multiple currency support for our pro accounts. 21 Currencies are now supported.

Our new visual customization feature has launched for our pro account stores. Let us know what you think:

http://www.clustershot.com/blog/archive/2010/april/customizethe

We're back up and running. For those of you who sold photos and hadn't reached the $100.00 payout level, or hadn't requested an early payout, we've sent your payment along with no additional fees.

For those of you thinking about upgrading to a pro account, now is the time. Our intro price of $20.00 for the year is still good for another 24-48 hours. After that we're launching new features and a new price (50.00).

Thanks to everyone for your patience and understanding during this time. In the end we think it's made ClusterShot better, and most importantly, better for the photographers who use it.

Quote from: NitorPhoto on April 06, 2010, 08:38
Good news. I want you to make money otherwise you will close the shop. 50$ is still a very good prize and I hope it helps you stay alive.
On the other hand. Uploading is extremely slow! I am uploading 300+ images in the current batch and it already took like 24 hours. Hey, I want ot upload 10k images it will take a year then?!

Can you contact us directly via our contact form? We want to get more information from you as to where you are uploading from, what client, etc. We should be quicker than that for uploads.

Thanks for all of your comments. I'll do my best to cycle back to them and address them correctly. I just wanted to let everyone know that we got the thumbs up from Paypal and we're making all the necessary roll-out changes here on our end. We should be back to normal within an hour or two.

We just wanted to give everyone an update.

We've made all of the necessary changes to the site that should free the restrictions on our paypal account. We have let Paypal know and they will be reviewing the changes we've made. Hopefully all will go well and we'll be back to normal within a number of hours.

Once the new changes go live to satisfy Paypal we will be waiting 1-2 days to roll out the new features that got us into this mess in the first place.

WARNING: For anyone who has been considering a pro-account with us this 1-2 day window is your last shot at getting in at the $20.00/year for your first year. When we launch the new updates we are raising our prices to a staggering $50.00/year. The big new feature launching is a very cool and very slick pro-store/page customization. Your own logo, choose a font, you own backgrounds, colours, etc.

Quote from: FD-amateur on March 31, 2010, 14:40
I sortof gave up on them. They are not stock oriented at all. All the plans they announce have nothing to with building a virtual stock site and grouping acounts, nothing with licenses and sizes.
I planned to write some integration but they don't even have a unique image IDs that addresses thumbs and full size pages, so it's far too much work to integrate.
They are totally obsessed with Flickr and I'm not interested with Flickr after they phased out my Pro account in a too blunt way because my shots were watermarked and I had links to sales sites.

I don't like that in "similar images" on Clustershot are linked to ports of free account amateurs. I'm not paying a Pro account to drive traffic to snapshooters. I wanted:

- variation in licenses: edtorial, commercial / RF, RF-extended;
- variation in sizes: web and full size, automatically priced differently;
- a virtual agency where accounts could be coupled to show "similars" or at least the free accounts could be left out;

Nothing of that has been announced in 7 months, so I think I'll just have to swallow my 20$ loss and start deleting in August. They obviously aren't interested in what we want. The direct payment is just another PITA. Although I could easily incorporate, I'm not planning to do it just for them, especially since I had no sale whatsoever despite they being prominent on my site. The 100$ payout limit is ridiculous for an average uploader, and it seems to become one of those sites earning money and then vanish, like LO and FM and Crestock.

No thanks. I stopped uploading months ago and I curse myself for the wasted time since even their IPTC extraction is non-standard. Why the heck they have to import the location in the keywords? Why the heck they don't import the title? Wasted...

I'm sorry to hear that you aren't happy with us. For the record, we don't link to other users on your pro site, only on the general ClusterShot site. As for grouping accounts (we're calling that "collections" internally) that is something that is definitely on our list of things to develop.

We've been fairly clear on our position regarding multiple sizes. We'll just have to agree to disagree.

What I can do for you is refund your $20.00. You obviously feel it hasn't been worth it for you. We'll gladly settle that for you. Just contact us directly with the email you use to log-in and we'll settle up.

Quote from: sharpshot on March 29, 2010, 16:40
Will be interesting to see if this works.  There is an obvious problem if a contributor doesn't pay you but hopefully that wont happen very often.

That is the only exposure for us. We trust our users and worst case scenario would only be out 1 month of revenue for the user as we would close their account if unpaid.

We've worked out a plan to conquer this issue:
http://www.clustershot.com/blog/archive/2010/march/frombuyerto

What this means is that you're going to be paid directly, then we'll take our slice from you once a month. We hope you like that option.

We hope to have this built, tested, and launched this week.

Let us know what you think.

Yes, all transactions are currently only in Paypal.

Apparently our webdav service is seeing mixed results

Thanks for your comments and for being a pro-account holder. We greatly appreciate the business. We have some really nice tools that at as soon as we figure this out you'll be able to play with.

What would the commission be if you sold to buyers directly? We're not sure yet and we'll probably be calling it a "listing fee" or something like that. It will not be more than 12%. Probably will be less given the fee issue you point out. We'll look at the #'s and let you know.

I definitely will be doing my best to talk with some other stock sites to figure out how they've dealt with this. Sadly Paypal isn't great for communications so we're left a little to our own devices as well.

We have some ideas and will be setting a direction within the next 24-36 hours. One of the possible directions, as mentioned above, is only facilitating the sale in information only and letting you and a buyer do the actual money exchange. This is Ebay's model. We're going to do our best to figure out the best way for sellers (and buyers) and move that way. Once we do that we can assure Paypal  that we're not criminals of any sort (which we've done already) and that they can reinstate our account for pro-accounts and services.

All-in-all we see this as an obstacle that is forcing us to think how to best do this. We hope to have a solution in place this coming week if all of the stars align.

So you heard it from us first:

During a round of upgrades and new feature launchs Paypal has deemed that we are an escrow company. As a result our account, which is our entire payment processing system, is restricted until we sort out a mountain of paperwork and by necessity change-up our business model.

You can get more information about what has happened here:
http://www.clustershot.com/blog/archive/2010/march/eatingescrow

This has been a very vocal community and I wanted to make sure that we interacted with you and got your feedback on how we should tweak our business model. The idea we are leaning towards the most is this:

We will become a listing company, much like Ebay. When someone goes to buy a photo they will pay you directly (via paypal, or whatever methods you choose). We will, of course, have a record of the sale and each month we would send you an invoice for the listing fees. Listing fees would be based on percentage of your sales. This, in our understanding, would alleviate our current affliction and I read enough of this board to know that a lot of photographers would appreciate getting the money first. After all, it's your money.

We will of course continue to charge for additional services such as a pro account (we've built awesome new customization tools that we can't launch until this is sorted out) and other additional features.

Let me know your thoughts. We're VERY open to everyone's opinions and feedback. We wanted you to hear this from us first. We pride ourselves in being transparent and forthcoming. We like it when other companies do that so we figured we should too.

Quote from: cardmaverick on February 18, 2010, 03:59

Quote from: clustershot on February 17, 2010, 19:39

Quote from: FD-amateur on February 12, 2010, 12:48

Quote from: runamock on February 12, 2010, 12:31Sounds like a good idea... worth pursuing. Have you contacted them about your wish list?

Not yet. I doubted if anybody is interested, and the integration work would take a lot of time.

Sorry to be late to the party.

We are interested. We have a planned set of features that would do some of what you're looking for. Without getting into much detail we're working out a way for anyone to put together any collection of images under their own "site". It would be like one of our pro-stores but for any collection of images. We have a number of steps to make and dependent features to build before that can become a reality bit it is in our plans.

Multiple sizes isn't in our plans.

What do you mean by "integration work"?

Cheers!
Dan

Thanks for featuring me on your front page! Overall, I really like the pro subscription, the analytics are awesome (blows away other sites "data" we get). I do have one big suggestion:

Make sure people know your license is unlimited reproductions. This is why I sell for about $30-50 a pop on your site - its essentially an EL license. I think people are more willing to buy if they understand that they are getting full res work with very broad terms. It's hard for me to convey this threw your site. I'm getting interest in my work there, I just feel like people need to better understand the deal they are getting.

Excellent Suggestion. We'll put some thought/work into making that more explicit.

Quote from: sharpshot on February 18, 2010, 10:05
By linking portfolio I mean a way of searching within a group of portfolios.  There have been several threads here about starting our own site but it has never happened.  Having a searchable collection on clustershot could be another option.

Ok, this sounds like something that will be doable with our new feature set. I'll keep you posted.

Quote from: FD-amateur on February 12, 2010, 12:48

Quote from: runamock on February 12, 2010, 12:31Sounds like a good idea... worth pursuing. Have you contacted them about your wish list?

Not yet. I doubted if anybody is interested, and the integration work would take a lot of time.

Sorry to be late to the party.

We are interested. We have a planned set of features that would do some of what you're looking for. Without getting into much detail we're working out a way for anyone to put together any collection of images under their own "site". It would be like one of our pro-stores but for any collection of images. We have a number of steps to make and dependent features to build before that can become a reality bit it is in our plans.

Multiple sizes isn't in our plans.

What do you mean by "integration work"?

Cheers!
Dan

Quote from: sharpshot on February 15, 2010, 08:17
If a lot of us used clustershot, it might be worth paying for our own marketing.  I am holding off for now, the site doesn't quite do what I want.  Hopefully they will improve it and I will give it a go.

If they add different sizes and let us link our portfolios, I will be more interested.

Thanks for the feedback. We have a slew of new features currently under development. We'll be rolling them out in the coming months. Some are trivial, others are more substantive.

Can you let me know what other features, other than the two you listed, would interest you? Also, can you clarify what you mean when you say "link our portfolios"?

Cheers,
Dan

Quote from: cascoly on October 21, 2009, 20:40
the payment split sounds ideal - and there's really NO reason all agecies couldnt do it, since it involves 0 work on their end - it even saves them the expense of sending out individual payments, reports, etc - paypal gives reports to sellers directly

I wouldn't go as far as saying that it involves no work. To implement Paypal's new API is a fairly substantial undertaking for the developers of a site. When you get into the istockphoto size of a site it becomes quite an engineering project. They are selling ~$850,000/day. Dealing with that amount of commerce and the corresponding traffic should not be under estimated. Should they hold your 99.99 forever? Probably not but once a company sets up a system and it becomes heavily used it can be hard to change both from a technical and inertia perspective.

Great conversation. As a site/service that is selling images we took the approach that it's your money and you should get it as quickly as possible. We're aiming to be a bit like Ebay but for photos.

The solution we came up with for payments was two fold:

1) Automatic payment when your account gets to 100.00 (nothing new here)
2) You can request a payment at any time for a fee of 5% of the payout with a minimum charge of 30 cents. This covers our transaction costs and gives us a little incentive to give you your money and not hold onto it.

While we like our solution we don't think it's ideal. We're partially limited by current micropayment services and fees. The good news is that both Paypal and Amazon have been updating their products and have some very cool new features we're looking at implementing. One of those features is advanced payment splitting. I.e. If a photo is sold on ClusterShot for 100.00 the payment can be split automatically at the payment provider end - $12.00 would be sent to us directly and $88.00 to you. We're investigating and will let you know what we find out.

Quote from: RacePhoto on September 22, 2009, 02:26
You would probably do well to have a human reviewing photos as well as keywords. For example...



background, Bottle, Can, canned, container, cooking, cylinder, distribution, eating, edible, expiry, extended, flavor, Flavour, Food, fruit, isolated, jar, jars, ketchup, life, Meat, Metal, nutrition, Old, opener, preservative, preserved, Reflection, safe, safety, sauce, saving, sealed, steel, Storage, stored, Survival, taste, tin, tomato, tomatoes, transport, travelling, Vegetables, White

I only hit a couple with bold that didn't fit.

Now imagine a buyer searching for "tomato isolated" and finding all kinds of things that have no tomatoes and are not isolated? I'd want to look elsewhere, where I could find what I was looking for, not pictures to wade through of something else.

Thank you for your feedback.  I appreciate the concern you have for the keywording. On the other end of the spectrum there are images without any keywords at all. Admittedly neither of these are ideal situations.

Part of the bigger issue going on here is that we are not really trying to become a micro-stock site like IstockPhoto. We got grouped in with them by TechCrunch this past winter and have been valiantly trying to NOT become that since. We are foremost building a platform for which photographers can sell their photos. A side effect of that is the open market that is clustershot.com.

The vast majority of our traffic, and sales, are from search engine refers. Someone searches google for 'Noe Valley Stock Photo", finds a photo and checks out. The other growing area of our traffic and sales is from our Pro Account users promoting their own stores. This, again, is how we're building out a photo selling platform.

All of this said: We are getting pushed into the global search issue fairly heavily and we will react and adjust to it.  Overtime we'll make the search better. We'll add new searching options, new ways to search, and new ways to sort photos. Please don't be disappointed if we decide to further the distance between how we do things and how Istock and the other micro sites do things. That market and method is saturated and we probably couldn't compete in any meaningful way with those big players. We'll be doing new things, some might fail, some might be very disruptive to the industry.

We truly appreciate all of the feedback. I'm sorry for the lengthy response but I feel it is better to explain our rational for doing or not doing something.

Quote from: tsmarkley on September 21, 2009, 02:19
I like the site, I signed up for a pro account since i was looking at setting up a web site anyways. easy interface. I was concerned though when I started searching pictures. There are a lot of photos with copy righted materials and logos everywhere. You might need a copyrights information link somewhere during the sign up process.

I like the watermark tool but I wish it was a little bigger.

Thanks for the feedback! We are in the process of revisiting our UI and warnings/notices for contributors and buyers. Part of this is explicitly stating that a photographer must have the legal right to sell the photos they are uploading. We also have a very quick and diligent reporting review system. If you find a photo you believe should not be for sale let us know. We will review it and defend or remove it VERY promptly. We are starting to look into ways to automate some of this and perhaps begin a human review of content.

In all honesty the only place that this has been an issue is in this forum. That isn't to say the comments here are valid and being digested here on our end. Simply, we have had no complaints from actual buyers/sellers. What we've found is that buyers are as smart about these issues as photographers.  Most, if not all, photos being sold are those without any noticeable or obvious legal issues.

As for the watermarks... We've had a few people complain that they are to large. I'm sorry, we can't please everyone.