pancakes

MicrostockGroup Sponsors


Show Posts

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.


Topics - einstein

Pages: [1]
1
General Stock Discussion / what is Dizinga?
« on: January 07, 2016, 01:55 »
Some time ago I received an invitation from a website called "dizinga" to submit my art there. I waited a couple of months and the website still exists. I don't know how they got my email and I suspect that they just want to steal my art, but I thought I ask here anyway.

Anyone any experiences with that website? Is it as fishy as it sounds?

2
I was just wondering: If my images fit spot on the kind of images an otherwise low earner agency is selling, could the low earner earnings skyrocket to the level of high earners?

Do you know of cases in which an official low earner makes more money than let's say shutterstock?
I'm looking specifically for different illustration types, but I think it would be interesting to hear about all kinds of niches.


3
Veer / Editing does not work any more
« on: December 11, 2015, 09:21 »
I uploaded about 100 images and I can't edit them. When I click on the link to edit, there is a delay (with a server timeout?) and then I get redirected to http://www.veer.com/more/contributor/

Anyone same problems?


4
Pond5 / appropriate photo pricing: No sales with 1000 images??
« on: December 11, 2015, 09:10 »
Yes, you read right, I have close to 1000 images at pond5 but no sales (well almost, I made 10$ in 2 years). I produce illustrations and my images sell pretty satisfactory on other agencies.

I was gradually going down with my prices in hope to get some sales but right now I'm at 7,50$ per image and still no sales.
I feel if I go lower I might as well give extended licenses for free.

What am I doing wrong? Now I'm thinking in opposite direction to drastically increase my prices to about 45$ and see if that shakes things up. Also, after some analysis I drastically changed my keywording strategy in my last batch (not approved yet), but I feel like I'm still poking in the dark.

Anyone out there making any money with illustrations at pond5, or is that a place to sell videos only?

5
Bigstock.com / Metadata: Uploading PNG and JPG at the same time
« on: September 09, 2015, 13:38 »
I'm currently uploading images in JPEG format to Bigstock, but I would like to add the PNG option as well. However PNG doesn't support IPTC metadata fields (correct me if I'm wrong), such that I still need to upload the JPEG, otherwise I would need to manually enter all keywords and descriptions again.

My theory is, that if I upload a PNG file and a JPEG file with identical file name (but different file ending), their system would recognize that. I would expect the system to show me only one uploaded image and automatically use the keywords&descriptions from the JPEG.

Is that true? Anyone with experience in uploading PNG's?
And what about differences in resolution? I reduce resolutions of my images according to Bigstock's filesize limit. This will usually result in different resolutions depending on the format.

I don't want to try it out, I prefer to ask.

6
I get the following useless message each time I try to submit the same image:

You must enter at least 5 single keywords or phrases separated by commas. Multiple words separated by spaces are treated as a phrase. Please ensure that your submission follows the guidelines provided by iStockphoto.

I entered 35 keywords and chose their meanings, but each time I submit I end up with the same error again.
Sometimes my title turns yellow, but it doesn't say anything about any title issue.

Just to clarify
-all 3 categories are chosen
-my title is 85 characters / 4 short sentences.
-quite long description (~1500 characters) but I never had issues with long descriptions before
-image type is chosen
-disambiguation checkboxes are chosen

Anyone any idea what is happening?
As if the torture of their submission process is not enough already.

edit:
It seems to be influenced by the disambiguation checkboxes. As soon as I change any of the detailed ones (when you click the plus symbol), I can't submit any more.



7
I'm a programmer and stock submitter so I was just wondering here: What keyword services are you still missing?

I have some working code in my sleeve (that I use for myself) which I could possibly turn into a product for everyone. I wonder if it's something worth thinking about. I could sort keywords by how well they will probably lead to sales, how descriptive they are, suggest missing keywords, calculate how closely they relate to each other, suggest keywords to put together a description, find niche keywords, find keywords that likely don't fit the image, estimate categories etc...

8
Hi guys :)

I did some heavy work to figure out
-the best number of keywords to submit to shutterstock
-the best number of words to use in the title/description

Given the time I invested, I decided to offer the information for a small fee here:
https://www.fiverr.com/manmademagic/reveal-best-number-of-keywords-for-shutterstock-submissions

Check it out and if I see enough appreciation, I will do more research for other websites as well.
I found the results quite interesting.

Have fun

einstein

19.03.2015
Just an update for the haters: Istock confirms how much title and description matters. While you waisted time hating me, I have done it for several months now. By now I am also hitting many first pages, especially on bigstock and 123rf, many of them are single keyword searches. 50 description keywords is btw not the optimum for istock, it's not surprisingly between the numbers they tested (assuming that a description is accurate as they noticed themselves).

I wonder why they need to rewrite 20000 descriptions and plan a rewrite for another 100000 to find out what I already know. I guess they want to increase sales for current images after that realization. Otherwise it's really not the most efficient way to get the data. Here is the link:

http://www.istockphoto.com/forum_messages.php?threadid=365797&page=1

9
Hi guys,

I had an idea to develop a browser plugin that could drastically shorten the time during the final part of submission (After FTP/site upload). If you wished that such a plugin existed, which browser would you prefer to be supported first? Firefox or Chrome?

The background is that I once used the plugin from picworkflow, but when I measured how much time it really saves me, the additional hassle was not worth it in my case. Especially their categorization tool was useless and did actually cost me more time than going directly to the submission page. I believe I can do that much much (much) better.

10
I just spend more than half a day submitting 56 images to 8 websites. I uploaded them (mostly) via FTP and they already did contain all the IPTC data (keywords, title, description). I was curious to write down how long each submission took in order to face the truth.

So here are the results:

photodune (envato) - 1 min of my life
No complaints here. I feel valued.

123rf - 1 min of my life
No complaints here. I feel valued.

canstockphoto 13 mins of my life
marking each image as illustration
editing and resubmitting 5 images where they complained about keywords

veer - 15 mins of my life (btw. veer's FTP generally doesn't work so I had to use their online upload functionality here)
I had to choose meanings of lots of my keywords. Clicks usually didn't came through and I ended up with a lot of website errors.
I had to reload the site a couple of times and most of those clicks got lost. At the end I ignored half of the keywords that I would have to explain.

pond5 - 23 mins of my life
applying template, choosing image type because that template part doesn't work, checking "go to next item" explicitly
The images must be process in linear manner, one needs to wait until next image shows up.

bigstock - 41 mins of my life
Titles were not retrieved from IPTC Data, had to copy and paste manually, 3 categories per image needed to be chosen. For those 3 categories one needs to go through 6 dropdowns.

shutterstock - 42 mins of my life
choosing categories and marking images as illustration, keywords will not be displayed if one blocks javascript

fotolia - 66 mins of my life
Did read Description as Title which led to a Title that was too long. Would be far slower if I hadn't chosen my categories in advance.
Each image must be marked as illustration, keywords are recognized but still require one unecessary additional click, terms must be accepted each time, often clicks to display all categories necessary.

dreamstime - 95 mins of my life
Titles were not imported from the IPTC data, needed to copy and paste manually, 3 categories needed to be chosen
The submission process is linear and one needs to wait until the next image shows up. I had complaints about too many keywords, because dreamstime flattens keywords not only by space, but also by the minus-sign.

istock - would have taken half a day and I was not willing to do that
No FTP upload, each file needs to be uploaded separately, so it already starts there. Even the upload (which I'm not counting here) would take ages.
Overwhelming number of categories (similar to Fotolia)
Each word has to be explained. Uploaded 1 image few months ago, and nothing since then. It's just beyond acceptable how they treat contributors during the submission process. And their software "DeepMeta" which they try to smuggle onto your pc instead of fixing the root cause of the problem, doesn't  work under Linux.

alamy - would have taken entire day
No FTP, crashing flash upload, images can't be edited before approval, flash again to edit image data, no IPTC possible because they have 4 classes of keywords and IPTC only supports 1 keyword list, several attributes must be chosen each time, keyword limits by letters instead of keyword count.

depositphoto - If you ask yourself why I didn't include it: I can't offer any experience, they think my images aren't of commercial value

Additional conditions: I already have chosen categories before downloading, so I only needed to look them up from a list when submitting. Otherwise Fotolia, Bigstock
and dreamstime would have taken a lot longer.

Anyone has any tricks up his sleeve how I can do all this painful online-stuff faster?

11
Maybe I'm mixing something up, but I thought that you need to categorize your images at pond5 (I submit to lots of websites).
I believe to remember that I had to categorize my images, but I can't find that field during submission. I keep lists of all categories for each website locally on my PC so I wonder whenever I wrongly renamed my list as "pond5". I used those lists with a tool I have written for myself and I don't want to keep categorizing if I don't need to.

Here is the list:
"abstract",   "aerials",   "alpha channel / greenscreen",   "archival",   "animation",  "animals / wildlife",   "backgrounds",   "buildings and monuments",   "business / commerce",   "celebrities / paparrazi",   "church and ministry",   "crowds",   "clouds",   "concepts",   "elements and effects",   "explosions",   "fire",   "food and drink",   "globes",   "health and beauty",   "holidays / celebrations",   "industry",   "lifestyle / people",   "lower thirds",   "loops / vj",   "medicine",   "military",   "music related",   "nature scenics",   "news / documentary",   "politics",   "retro",   "science",   "slow motion",   "sports",   "stereoscopic 3d",   "technology",   "textures",   "timelapse",   "transportation",   "travel",   "underwater",   "cities / urban scenics",   "verticals",   "virtual sets",   "transitions and wipes",   "weddings"

Is or was this Pond5? Any idea which other website this could be? Can I throw that away? Google search wasn't very helpful.

12
I use the following IPTC field to write my titles into jpeg files:

"Iptc.Application2.Headline"

Shutterstock reads the data out correctly, but on Bigstock I need to reenter the Title manually which is very annoying.
Is that Bigstock's fault and should I contact their support or do they just use a different Field for Titles?

If they use a different IPTC field then which one is it?

"Iptc.Application2.Title" is not supported by IPTC standard:
http://exiv2.org/iptc.html

13
Hi guys,

I get unusually many rejections because "similarity" at Fotolia. It's quite annoying since my submission effort of larger batches is not rewarded very much. Any advice?
Some cases are not understandable to me at all, others could be understood, but they get accepted everywhere else.

About the ones that I can see how that could be justified:
On shutterstock, when I have similar versions of the same image, I can make a special kind of release to link those images together. For example I had a background that was selling very well, so I made more versions of it. No problem at shutterstock and the other backgrounds sell nice as well now. And it actually boosted the sales for the original image. Fotolia on the other hand seems not to provide such functionality. Is that right?  I'm not sure if their uniqueness craze is such a good marketing strategy. Especially in cases where someone wants to make more of what he/she knows will sell.

About the other images that are not so similar and where it's a little less understandable:
I have a particular style and I wonder if their reviewers don't confuse style for similarity.
I also wonder, since I developed software for myself  to keyword my own images, if they count the number of shared keywords between images. There are some keywords that occur in almost every image of mine, since they address my style.

It almost looks to me as if they had some software that generates some metrics for the reviewer and the reviewer rejects based on those metrics, possibly not even caring about the actual image.

Anyone else having a hard time with Fotolia like that?



14
I wasn't sure where to post it. I guess it's general discussion indeed.

When I do my keywording, I always wonder whenever it's wise to add some very generic keywords which fit into almost every image.
nobody, anything, pic, picture, image, graphic, one, color,...

I'm confused by them. Here are my thoughts:

nobody - can be useful to filter out people from the search. But are buyers even aware that they could do such a trick? Does anyone has experience with that keyword?
anything - user is bored and enters "anything" into the searchbox - is that even realistic? Even if he does - sale or waste of keywords?
pic, picture - user could use that to filter out video or audio. But again, does that make any sense?
image - anyone ever entering that word into the search box?
graphic - especially web designers might look for "web graphic". Or not?
one - if there is one object versus multiple objects, does that matter to most buyers? Do I waste my keywords again?
color - if I look for "green frog", I won't enter "green colored frog" or "frog green color". Why would anyone enter "color" into the search box? I would assume that potential buyer will just name the color and that's it.

What is your experience with generic keywords? Are they worth it or are they junk? Which are junk?

"Color" for example, is used a lot, and I don't understand why. Is that just some mistake made by lots of people?

15
I recently noticed that Fotolia presets the country-field during submission to be my home country.
Is that supposed to be the country the image is coming from or the country the image will be sold in?

Can't find anywhere what this country-field actually means. My keywords are in English of course.

If that's the country my image will be sold in, I better not be a citizen of Liechtenstein :D

16
Why would they reject? Everyone says that they are quite willing and accept almost everything. Well, clearly not the case for me. Will try again, but wondering still. Especially after successfully selling on shutterstock (I love shutterstock btw.). Almost sounds to me like they pick some random people to bully them and make them write posts like that, in order to fake how strict they are. I see a lot of artists there who are much lower quality than me and I also see people from shutterstock submitting similar images to mine.

Anyone had the same problem? Should I even bother? I have lots of illustrations and I wanted to put them up there.


17
Since I don't use adobe for my illustrations (inkscape together with other secret tools is enough for me and it doesn't cost a dime), I was wondering which agencies would allow to upload my svg files without asking for eps10. This could make some nice amount of additional money since vectors are very much looked for and some of my illustrations either are vectors or can easily be made into ones.

I'm curious. What are your best svg earners if any exist?

18
I recently registered to the top 10 agencies and started submitting my illustrations.
Now I'm thinking about adding some of the low earners to my list of agencies.
However it's only worth the hassle, if they don't sell my content too cheaply and if they are specific to what I have to offer.
If they are adapted/specialized to my content, it might still be worth it.

So I'm looking for the biggest/best agencies specifically adapted to my illustrations.

I attach some examples [24.03.2014 - attachment removed]

Anyone any advice?


Pages: [1]

Sponsors

Mega Bundle of 5,900+ Professional Lightroom Presets

Microstock Poll Results

Sponsors