Quote from: cthoman on August 10, 2012, 22:43

Quote from: jsnover on August 10, 2012, 22:42
I hadn't seen that. And how are contributors to Thinkstock to be compensated for the images that end up being picked in this collection?

I was kind of curious about that too. Most of the info on it seemed a little light on details.

No idea...But it seems like Google wants to enter the stock photo industry.

From the article...

We know how it goes. You're working on that killer presentation or document and want to add images to go with your work...but lo and behold you can't seem to find the right stock photo, or any picture that's suitable. Oh, for the love of god, why would anyone use these images for anything?

On that note, Google is extending its stock image library for Google Drive — which includes its Docs products as well as cloud storage — and the search giant wants you to help pick the contents.

The company has a deal in place with Getty Images-owned Thinkstocks.com and is crowdsourcing the content, giving users the chance to nominate ten photos from the archive site that they'd like to see added to Google's collection.

Google says it will use the ideas to "create and curate the next generation of our stock image library."

Sources:
http://thenextweb.com/google/2012/08/09/google-wants-you-to-help-stock-its-google-drive-stock-images-library/
https://plus.google.com/112893701314508522131/posts/6p2e3FTeKL4

Sorry everyone. There are a few glitches with the uploads right now. I'm working to fix them asap! Sorry for the delay and thanks for being patient!

Daniel

Hi disorderly,

I understand your need for FTP. It's definitely faster for sending lots of files. We recently moved servers and I am still working on implementing FTP so I will let you know when it's available again. Thanks for being patient!

Hi MicrostockExp,

I created your FTP account for you and emailed you with instructions.

Hi cd123,

I usually create FTP accounts within 48 hours so I'm sorry for not getting you your information sooner. I created the account and sent the credentials to your email address.

Also, the upload queue is a pre-approval area like rubyroo said, so once your images are there you don't have to do any more work to them before they are approved. If they are sitting in the queue for more than 48 hours we probably are just overwhelmed by the amount of uploads. They will be reviewed as soon as possible!

Also, rubyroo, if you email me your username on our website to daniel[at]graphicleftovers.com I can create an FTP account for you as well.

The server's back up. What a pain...We have been growing a lot in both traffic and uploads in the past few months and that has caused a lot of issues with our servers. We are fixing these issues but I'm really sorry for the site being down because of our growing pains.

Sorry guys. Our host, mediatemple is having issues on their end and our website has been down for around 7 hours now. We are working hard to get it back up as soon as possible.

@Dirk - You can only see sellers that you referred, not buyers, so if you have referred sellers to our site they will show up in the bottom of your "My Account" page.

@jareso - We do collect both the referrer URL and the click-through count. The click-through count is shown at the top of your "My Account" page under "Total Earnings" and the line should look like this: Referrals: 10 signups / 85 clicks. I just added the referral URL next to the username for you.

On another note, people were concerned about the high views of their images compared to low sales numbers in another thread on this forum. This was caused by search engine bots crawling the site which greatly skewed the view numbers. That bug has been fixed so it only records human visits to the image from now on.

@mtkang - Microbius is correct, we import FTP several times a day. We are adding server capacity in the near future so they will be imported more frequently.

@Anita We added that a few weeks ago so that's where your uploads go now instead of straight into the Pending area.

Thanks guys With all the unsettling news lately hopefully unhappy buyers on other sites will flock to GL this holiday season!

Hi Mike and and Microbius,

I updated the account page for sellers with monthly totals at the bottom. Let me know if that works for you and if you'd like any other kind of reporting available

Hi Mike,

Sure, what kind of reports would you like to see?

Hi all...I hope everyone had a good holiday!

@jwsc101 and @jareso - I added a section for referred users today at the bottom of the My Account page so you can see which sellers you've referred and the date they signed up. I hope this helps!

@ibogdan - We've been cleaning up our library recently due to copyright infringement issues and we are trying to weed out similar images in portfolios so the collection is more unique. That is why we have been rejecting more images than usual lately. I'm sorry you haven't sold much yet.

Also, the GL Collection is a section for images that we feel are exceptionally well done. They are hand picked by us.

@stockastic - it's not really running away from the problem...I think of it as an SEO issue, and the issue with SEO is always staying ahead of the curve and what everyone else is doing...Google is pretty good at filtering spam and I tend to use them as inspiration for our own website. Everyone is becoming SEO savvy nowadays so you have to be more creative than the next guy to stand out in the sea of websites/images on the internet, you know? Not trying to say you have to revisit all of your images and redo them, but the more time spent on each image is what separates good from great in my opinion. I see a lot of great images from awesome photographers/illustrators on our site that have one or two word titles and descriptions and I know that when Google comes and indexes images from the site, it tends to look for more title and description heavy pages/images to index. So, good titles and descriptions would help you not only on our site but in google image search results. Also, if you have any suggestions, I'd be willing to hear them

Hi everyone,

I wanted to reply to a few of your questions and concerns...

@stockastic: since many contributors on stock sites abuse keywording, we took the same approach that google does in its search results instead of limiting the amount that you can use. Image titles and descriptions are factored into search results a great deal more than keywords are, so if someone is spamming keywords for their images, their images will not appear in all those search results as much as artists who use quality and relevant titles and descriptions. It's less work on our part and the contributor's, and it provides better search results for the buyer that way.

@jareso: you are correct, the views do count bots (like google and yahoo crawling the site) and we intend to correct that soon. It does not count you looking at your own images though.

@sharpshot: we have been swamped with contributors with large portfolios signing up recently, and that is probably the reason for lower sales in the past month or so. Hopefully that will turn around soon with the marketing and promotion efforts we are doing for the site.

Other than that, I'm glad to hear it's so easy to upload to our site. Now we are primarily focused on getting more buyers so everyone can make more money!

Hi louoates,

To answer your first question, the iPad can view most sites out there on the internet, with the exception of websites built in flash or websites that have flash tightly integrated into their design. The iPad also doesn't have a "file system" like your desktop computer, so if you go to any stock image site and want to purchase an image, you won't be able to download the file because they are most likely in .zip format. You also can't open vectors in EPS or SVG format on an iPad (yet). Basically, you can only download a few types of files from the internet on an iPad, JPEGs being one of them.

With our GL4iPad site, we designed it from the ground up just for iPad. The design and content are stripped down somewhat and the pages were built in HTML5 and CSS3 to make the experience a lot faster than browsing the normal "desktop" version of the website. When browsing with an iPad, you won't see vector files since they can't be opened or edited on the iPad, and when you purchase a JPEG, the website will prepare the file for you by unzipping it and providing simple instructions to download to your "Photos" folder.

With the new platform growing like crazy and apps like Keynote, Pages and Wordpress becoming really popular, iPad owners are using the new device to produce content like presentations, documents and blog posts for their business. We wanted to cater to this market by providing professional graphics and photos to these content producers with an affordable and easy-to-use resource that was built just for them.

Our site, http://graphicleftovers.com has a pretty unique portfolio of images. We don't sell any photos that require a model release, so that knocks out you recognizing the models in our photo shots! Our photos are more objects, foods, scenery, etc. and we have tons of vectors...I don't know if there are a lot of "niche" stock sites out there besides the site, photocast.com, mentioned earlier but we hope to have the different stuff buyers are looking for. There are so many images out there now that it's nice to be able to organize them into smaller niches for people looking for non-mainstream or most popular stuff while keeping it affordable...

Hi Everyone,

Turns out there was a problem with our FTP server for the past 2 or 3 days. Sorry about the frustration, but it should be fixed now. You can continue uploading as usual again. Sorry and thanks!

Hi Thomas,

That's not good! I was wondering why I haven't seen any new stuff from you. I am assuming you are using the web uploader...are you on a windows computer? We've been having problems with all the different versions of flash and IE browsers tend to cause problems with the uploader. I noticed you have an FTP account, so if you could use that instead of the web uploader, I can guarantee your files will work since it isn't relying on the browser and adobe flash to upload.

Hi Anita,

We've been adding stock photos for a few months now, and they are starting to sell. They aren't as popular as our vector illustrations which is the niche we started with, but since we have more design related photos (without people in them), people are starting to notice that and come to us for that too

Hi Anita,

We've been adding so many images lately that our uploader has been getting stuck and I've had to un-jam it a few times It should be good now and there shouldn't be as much of a delay as you saw before. Thanks for being patient!

Hi everyone,

Sorry for not replying sooner. I was out of town this past weekend for my birthday!

@jareso,

To answer you first, we just started accepting photos a few months ago and sales have slowly started to pick up in that area. We are still staying niche focused and do not accept photos requiring a model release since there aren't any other sites that focus on non-people related photography. We think that separates us a little bit from the other guys. As we start adding more and more photos to our website, I'm sure the sales will pick up more for you.

Also, I'm glad the discussion about the views / sales was cleared up! Our view count is accurate on our site also.

The $5 price sells well on our site...I'm sure it being the "default" price has something to do with it But, if you have more detailed or complex vectors, $10+ vectors sell well. Also, if your images are listed at $1 on other sites I wouldn't recommend setting the same images' prices at $10 or more on our site, but that's up to you.

Hi stockastic,

We've been having issues with the flash uploader on our site. I think it is a windows specific issue and I'm working on fixing it still. In the meantime, we can set up an FTP account for you. If you can email me your username on our site at [email protected] I will set up an FTP for you. Thanks and sorry for you having to wait!

Oops, missed that. We removed the line from the blog article.