I found an article on Pickerell's site saying that
stocksy's members have voted to open up the membership to more people. Is this true?

I didn't have any problems with the speed of opening and I live in an out of the way small town in Texas. I was wondering how they plan to make money though. It's a nice site and I wish them success

I can't find anything on their forum about this so I was wondering if this means that istock is going to disappear. Will our images be on Getty instead of istock, I don't think Getty contributors would be happy about that. What will happen to exclusives, are they still going to exist or are they out the window. Presumably the only way to get your files off there if you don't like what they are doing would be to do something bad and get booted, they would view that as a punishment or maybe they would just keep the files and say they belonged to them...

There is a state of emergency in the entire province of Alberta, has destroyed  an entire town (Fort McMurray- hope that's the right spelling)

I tried several times to logon to istock today but couldn't. I wanted to see if they had started the subs payouts yet and if they had removed last month's total, but couldn't get through. I can't help wondering if they are going to go broke one of these days after all the comments I've read about their downfall, hopefully not yet.

Recently I became aware that my pictures were being sold under the partner program. I wasn't aware of this due to not being very hands on with my portfolio and I thought anyway that I was opted out being exclusive. I tried to discover a way to opt out but the instructions to do so didn't lead anywhere (preferences - my uploads - manage collections) there isn't any manage collections that I could find. Does anyone know how to do this? I just don't want to sell my images for 38c - makes me feel like the Little Match Girl!

Alamy has passed istock this morning in the poll. It did the other day too but yesterday sank down again. this is exciting.

"But as IS does not accept editorial and all content featuring people should come with a release"

I don't think this is correct. istock has accepted photos from me that are editorial (a few of which have even sold!), they do require special formatting, but haven't asked for releases of the people in the photos. I believe they do want property releases though if there are restrictions by the property owners.

iStock just pays the same whatever the size

I believe Blender is free, but I've never used it so can't comment

The population of Iran is not 680 million more like 80 million

Under Microstock Poll Results on the right hand side it says that iStock's Earnings Rating is 41.2 but directly underneath it says exclusive is 234. What does this mean? Is it a misprint or does it mean that exclusive income has suddenly made a massive jump from a few days ago?

What is 500px. They have 50,000,000 pictures, they say, and the ones I saw were really good, maybe not altogether  stock images, but good. They aren't listed here. Can anyone tell me?

I couldn't find the exclusive forum on istock this morning. Is it still there? Also, in the critique forum kelvinjay said that anyone with a camera could shoot animals and nature. I wonder if he has ever tried researching locations, lugging heavy  (and expensive) equipment and waiting for hours until the light is right or the wild life appears. True, this doesn't sell but that doesn't mean that it is easy!

It's so much more fun and interesting to read this forum than the one on istock. Loved the cartoon! Thanks

I just had one of those sent in on nov 16 and it was approved 2-3 days ago so that's about 5 weeks.

I did have an image rejected outright and I tried to submit it to scout who refused to review it. I think the rejection was either for copyright or property infringement.  The image was from Hagia Sofia in Istanbul. This structure is about 1500 years old and the christian iconography must be older than the 17th century at least, because that is when the turks overran Istanbul and turned HS into a mosque. it is owned by the Turkish state. The odd thing is that there are 57 pages on Hagia Sofia in the best match with essentially the same subject material. Well, it isn't worth worrying about as it probably wouldn't be seen let alone bought

The site has stopped altogether at least with regard to the forums - nothing comes up but an empty page. I can view photos in best match etc but I can't view my own stuff. Also I was trying to upload some photos and the deep meta was crawling so I had to stop. I can't check if they uploaded or not.There is something not right over there!

This is a very interesting thread so I looked up some entries on Stocksy - I searched through animals looking for hummingbirds. I couldn't find any way of making the search specific so I looked through all the animals! There were mostly domestic, farm and zoo animals with not a whole lot of wildlife. I found an image mis-labelled Whooping Crane which was in fact a greater egret in its nesting plumage, only found two hummingbirds, neither of them was remarkable. In fact the second had some very annoying large brilliant red blobs in the background which completely detracted from the bird.

Of course, this kind of image probably doesn't sell well anyway - after all you aren't going to advertise toothpaste with a snarling jaguar (although that might be interesting) but still there seems to be the potential for the same problems other stock sites have - inaccurate keywords, odd taste in picking the pictures and an unhelpful search engine.

Just for fun I looked up the keywords used by some of the "similars" I found in my portfolio, just to see what was similar about them. One had keyword "bird of paradise" (a tropical flower), but I could not find any bird of paradise in that image, however following up on the next similars to his/hers all three had prominently displayed birds of paradise. Curiously enough mine didn't have a bird of paradise in it, (nor the keyword"bird of paradise").  That particular image was of a hummingbird perched on a wall surrounded by flowering verbena plants yet the keywords included "flight" (where nothing was flying), "single flower" (where there were dozens of flowers), "Caribbean sea" (no sea in sight Caribbean or otherwise) and three names of tropical countries. I realized it wasn't fun anymore so I packed it in.
My point is that the similars being imposed will never work unless they tighten up the keywording system - it is a joke right now. Why not spend a little money and hire a few people who can spell and look up words and phrases in a dictionary or encyclopedia, inspectors will not do as there isn't any evidence that they can do any of those things. Ah, istock, I don't think you'l do any of that

I just looked at the istock forum and couldn't find any mention of the newsletter, certainly no reaction from contributors there. Looking back at the recent posts here, specifically about istock, I get the impression that there is a general loss of interest in istock, except for a few optimists. I also looked up the microstock expo advert and couldn't find any speakers from istock only Bruce Livingston who is hardly from istock any more oh and the infamous Yuri but he didn't mention istock as his sponsor.  It may be that expressing an opinion on the istock forum is hazardous to your health!

It's good to post on this site, at least with regard to istock, as the views expressed here are permitted to be a bit more down to earth than over there.

There's a thread on the istock forums on editor's pick. Nobody seems to know what this exactly is. It doesn't carry an increased royalty and it isn't confined to vetta files. It seems to be a pat on the back but no info on whether it is an algorithm or a person awarding it. There isn't any momentum from the company to reveal the criteria for these files, which is odd as if it means that they are "better" than others they would be eager to have everyone incorporate these criteria  and thus raise the standards of their offerings. It's a puzzle.

I was wondering what the relationship between Getty and Flickr was. Or is there any relationship? I met someone at a workshop who said that his friend posted on Flickr and then some of his photos were put somewhere in Getty, but he didn't know where.

What do inspectors do now that everything is accepted?

I just get a blank page.