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Messages - Big Toe
1
« on: May 29, 2023, 12:19 »
artificially inflating downloads
How is that? What should be done to receive such a warning?
Getting your friends to buy your work or buying it yourself to change your images position and push it onto first pages etc.
try reading the TOS - follow your advice and risk being banned
Lowls does not give advice to do anything here, they are just answering the question what "artificially inflating downloads" means.
2
« on: May 29, 2023, 06:56 »
artificially inflating downloads
How is that? What should be done to receive such a warning?
Getting your friends to buy your work or buying it yourself to change your images position and push it onto first pages etc.
How does Shutterstock know that buyers are my friends? 
If your friends buy one or two of your images, Shutterstock will most likely not know and they probably don't care. However, if, for example, people with subscriptions use their unused downloads near the end of the month to download a lot of images from a single contributor or a small group of contributers, then they may become suspicious.
3
« on: May 28, 2023, 01:16 »
It's the pattern of similarities that they've picked up on, otherwise their account would have been suspended the first time they uploaded similar content.
In addition to that they may also have noticed that the stuff was (presumably) uploaded with the same IP address.
4
« on: May 26, 2023, 05:35 »
I've never seen a UFO. Keep in mind that my cameras haven't either. My night timelapse cameras, usually one but sometimes two, have recorded nothing. There are people with 24/7 sky watching cameras looking for meteorites. There's a world network of those. No space ships. Astronomers around the world, watching day and night. No space ships.
They all use cloaking devices, so you cannot see them. The cloak is only dropped in the presence of a true believer.
5
« on: May 14, 2023, 18:04 »
That's a Babylon 5 reference 😳 I'm afraid mentioning Babylon 5 is now regarded as a hate crime. Like mentioning George Lazenby. He exists but we never speak of him.
Of course I would have preferred a Star Trek reference. However, it is fairly well established that the most likely candidates there, the Vulcans, will ignore the Earth until we will develop the Warp drive. Now, if you are looking for an explanation of the Roswell incident, it is clear by now that this was caused by three Ferengi inadvertently traveling back in time (and one shape shifter, but I think he was not registered at the time).
6
« on: May 13, 2023, 06:25 »
https://streamable.com/4nkwsz
This is a section of one of the videos. I see the light moving and use the phone camera. It is gliding slowly. Any quick movement is me. It also gets bigger because I zoom in. I'm not sure how much I zoomed in by. It's max is 10x so it has been magnified by 10 at most. But the lens is 26mm so pushes it away. The size I saw was between these two sizes.
Probably a Vorlon vessel. The First Ones are looking out for us. Or else it could be a helicopter partially obscured by veil clouds. But how likely is that?
7
« on: April 20, 2023, 13:32 »
Account closed for Twitter Posts? I'll assume they also blocked you from Twitter access to their pages and removed your posts?
https://submit.shutterstock.com/legal/terms?language=en#:~:text=The%20following%20Terms%20of%20Service%20%28%22TOS%22%29%20is%20a,carefully%20and%20be%20sure%20you%20understand%20it%20fully.
Nothing about Shutterstock's Discretion in section 4.
See the last words in 4 c: "Shutterstock has the right to refuse to establish an account or to close any existing account, for fraud, intellectual property infringement, violation of a third party's rights including those of privacy or publicity, artificially inflating downloads, submission of material that is obscene in nature, violent or that might be construed as defamatory, failure to comply with Shutterstock's guidelines as may be amended from time to time, for any breach of the terms of this or any other agreement that you have with shutterstock, or for convenience." So they reserve the right to close accounts whenever they find it inconvenient to keep the account open.
8
« on: April 06, 2023, 17:35 »
But okay, at least it seems to be possible to continue a political career even in Germany if you had a criminal record. Excerpt from the German Criminal Code:
45
Loss of the ability to hold office, eligibility and the right to vote
(1) Any person convicted of a crime and sentenced to a term of imprisonment of at least one year shall lose the capacity to hold public office and to obtain rights from public elections for a period of five years.
How that would play out with the Chancellor now, I don't know. But as a legal layman, I would say that this is also possible here. Unless, as Zero Talent also quotes, that a court prevents that.
Apparently not much has changed. With Hitler, there were also more than 5 years between the imprisonment and the election as chancellor.
There is also the case of Dieter Althaus, who was Minister President in Thuringia, a German state, who was convicted of negiligent homicide for a skiing accident in Austria in 2009 and fined 33,000. He stayed in office and even ran for office again later the same year. His party, the conservative CDU, lost the election by a landslide, though, so it may not have been the smartest decision to run for office again. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dieter_Althaus
9
« on: March 02, 2023, 14:21 »
Really curious what do you think about it and if you agree with conclusions
Thank you for your effort to analyse this. I can't really say that I agree with the conclusions, though. You write: "Looking at how much you can earn, its easy to see that the majority of money actually comes from low and middle-earners, multiplied by large numbers. Highest income comes from too few files to hope to make a difference. Even the lowest earning category of Steves files that produced as little as $1 for the lifetime (!), multiplied by 1000 of files, multiplied by 10 selling agencies, already produced $10,000."
However, the diagram about the earning per agency and year clearly shows that until 2015, the majority of sales come from just two agencies, Shutterstock and Getty/iStock. In 2017 Adobe Stock joins the club. Only in 2016 the earnings are mor evenly distributed. Also the share of the medium and low earners diminishes over the years, again with the exception of 2016. in 2022, the three leading agencies earned more than three quarters of the overall earnings. If you get to a different result by multiplying earnings per image with files per category, your calculations must be flawed. Perhaps due to rounding erros, because the category with images in the category with lifetime earnings of $1 proably also includes images that earned less than $1. Another confounding factor is probably that most of the images that earned money at the low earners did so in previous years, when it was still easier to sell images. For example you can see in the diagram with the earnings per year and agency that Canva and 123RF used to make decent amounts of money, but do not do this anymore.
10
« on: March 01, 2023, 18:56 »
Maybe interesting.
A comparison of average RPI from some stock photographers.
https://photutorial.com/how-much-can-you-make-selling-stock-photos/
Hmmm,
I find this source rather questionable.
"Key Takeaways
On average, stock photographers make $0.02 per image per month with stock photos, while professionals make $0.05-$0.25 per image per month."
Professionals, in my view, must be many times higher than $0.25. Some who are here on the forum are at ten times that without being professionals.
And I also find it very difficult to imagine that contributors create or shoot 10,000 images, keyword them and upload them to earn an average of $200. I think the data is wrong.
It is clear that the person who wrote this does not know the first thing about the stock photo market or statistics. Just consisder the first diagram, which is labeled "Mean earnings per royalty-free license sale" and compare it to the table below. What they call "mean" is not the arithmetic middle or anything making any sense, but the mean distance between the minimum and maximum value given in the table for license sales for the various agencies. That way, they calculate a "mean earning" of about three dollar per sale for Shutterstock, not taking into account that the 0.1$ sales are far more frequent than the 5.8$ sales. The rest is mainly anecdotic evidence form people who published there earning on Youtube channels or Websites. The first person he quotes has uploaded a whopping number of 30 images to Shutterstock and had 10 saels in four months. On that solid data basis, they calculate the average earnings per month. The other people they mention have uploaded more images, but it still remains anecdotical. The number about what professionals earn per image and month seems to be taken from these anecdotes.
11
« on: February 21, 2023, 15:58 »
And it didn't wilt under the lights? Tell us your secret!
SS = 983,678 sliced tomato stock photos, vectors, and illustrations are available royalty-free.
AS = 745,250 results for sliced tomato in all
DT = 144,603 sliced tomato stock images and stock footage are available royalty-free.
According to some theories, you should be uploading your slice tomato images to DT for better sales? 
I do not doubt that the field of sliced tomatos is very competitive. It should be noted, though, that only a very small percentage of the nearly one million images at Shutterstock show sliced tomatos as the main subject. If you switch the sorting to Fresh Content, you will see that most of the images coming in show things like pizza with tomatos, or even just tomato sauce or other stuff that contain tomatos or one of it's products as ingredient and some sort of slice (for example pizza slices). Shutterstock obviously does a good job of presenting the user with the best (or at least most popular) images within the minority of real tomato slices when the sorting is set to Popular.
12
« on: February 21, 2023, 15:49 »
How dare you insult my catalog of 52,000 photos of the same tomato.
You should consider investing in a second tomato.
13
« on: February 17, 2023, 06:11 »
What about the Lizard People? Where do they fit into this?
You are probably thinking of the Cardassians here. While they have been described as somewhat lizard like or reptile like, this is mainly based on purely superficial similarities. They are clearly a humanoid species, proven by their ability to successfully interbreed with Bajorans. And then there are the somewhat less well known Gorn, of course, for which the reptile comparison is more justified. They have no connection to contrails on earth, though, as we will not meet them for at least another century, although there are people like Sheldon Coooper who have been troubled with Gorn infested nightmares. Some people claim that this has been caused by watching too much Star Trek, as if that was possible.
14
« on: February 15, 2023, 17:20 »
if you make out call signs (the #'s on the back of the jets), then you 'may' need to say it is editorial (depending on the site).
also - most likely they are 'chemtrails' (not contrails). depends on altitude and length, and whether it dissipates into a cloud (in which case its a chemtrail).
the ones spraying chemicals in the sky are most likely military, although sometimes they go in aircraft that looks like regular aircraft.
The term "chemtrails" is almost always used in connection with chemtrail conspiracy theories and should not be used for contrails. Whether a contrails dissipates into a cloud depends on the altitude of the aircraft and the weather conditions and is no indication that anything other than the combustion engine exhaust is emitted by the plane. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemtrail_conspiracy_theory
15
« on: February 14, 2023, 11:58 »
Hey, Sometimes If I want to take a closer shot of lets say smartphone - the screen gets some ugly flickers. I don't even know how to call it. But mostly if screen is brighter and you move camera closer then the flicker gets more visible. Do you guys know how to avoid it? Maybe it is technically impossible to remove it and it all depends on "Screen technical characteristics" like LED, OLED, refresh rate and etc? However if I change screen refresh rate from 60 to 90, nothing changes. Also enabling Canon setting "flicker remove" does not help either.
The effect in the first picture looks like a Moir interference pattern to me. This can happen when two (or more) period pattern are overlaid, like in this case the pixel on the screen and the pixel on the chip of the camera. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moir%C3%A9_patternYou can try to minimize the the effect by varying the angle and/or distance. In which you take the photo. Wikipedia suggest a 30 degree angle when taking a picture of a TV screen. Perhaps this also works with a smartphone display.
16
« on: February 12, 2023, 15:52 »
I wonder, did you expect to find in the link "Shutterstock uses algorythm XYZ to serve your files (just like ribtoks said)"?
No, what I would expect is that there is some evidence at Shutterstock (or Adobestock ect.) that keywords are matched to concepts as you claim. Unless you are saying that this is just an internal thing and has no practical consequences. In that case, why should we care? You see, I'm not here to prove something to you.
And we are not here to accept your word as gospel, just on your say-so.
17
« on: February 10, 2023, 16:39 »
Do you have any shred of evidence that anything like this happens?
Well, as I said, I do not have access to their systems so I cannot say exactly how to they store/index data. However, this part, as I mentioned, is well-researched so I would imagine they use an industry-level solution which I can relatively precisely describe.
If you are interested to read about concepts and search, I'd recomment to start here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound-term_processing. Note, this is also a bit of generic hand waving in the article, but at least, if you are interested, it will give you a better direction of the search.
As I mentioned, what is not standardized is how they sort outputs of the search results, while storage and indexing more or less is.
So you are just guessing. I looked into the link you provided and also into wikipedia article on concept search that is linked there, and I do not see any evidence that the search engines at the major microstock sites work that way, except that they may address issues like various forms of the same word (strike vs. striking was given as an example) and sometimes minor misspellings, but the issues with polysemy and synonymy. That means that a search for "fast" will not show images that only have the keyword "quick", even though the words stand for the same concept.
18
« on: February 10, 2023, 16:24 »
Some search engines will also include pictures where Paris is only in the title, but not all do that and it would be stupid to rely on that. Even if an image shows up, when the search term is only in the titles, you would have no guarantee that it stays that and also the image may get a better search placement when the word is in the title and the keywords, instead of only in the title or only the keywords.
Only in the title? Where and then why do we worry so much about keywords if they are irrelevant? Maybe I don't understand, but using the Paris example, why would some search ignore the keywords?
...
But the question is, where do you find a search that only uses Title or Description?
This is not what I wrote. what I am saying is that some search engines will include images in the search result where the word entered in the search (the search term) is included in the title/description but not the keywords. That does not mean that the search ignores the keywords.
19
« on: February 10, 2023, 08:38 »
Could you please elaborate ?
Indexing for search is quite more complex than just taking taking all the keywords you entered, creating tens of thousands of "lists" (per each keyword) with all the files that have that keyword and then when customer entered "mangrove forest background", checking if the given file in the in the list of "mangrove", in the list of "forest" and in the list of "background" - then showing it.
Of course the search engine does not check each file individually, whether it fits the search criteria. What happens is that the engine runs a SQL query (or possibly some other query language) against a database, where the relationships between files and keywords is stored in large tables. It is then task of the database management system to access this information as efficiently as possible.
The way it works in reality is that all of the these keywords are essentially replaced to one of the concepts (in the so-called "concept tree") that agencies search engine understands. Amount of concepts is smaller than amount of the keywords (there're just too many different words, just the first 100 pages of search results contained approximately 49 thousand different keywords, that's a lot). It could be that the concept is exactly equal to the keyword (e.g. "background") or might be that it's not (e.g. keyword is "paris", but the concept is "city").
Do you have any shred of evidence that anything like this happens? When a buyer is entering "paris" in the search, they will expect pictures from Paris (or possibly from Paris Hilton or other people with that name) and not images from Berlin, London or New York, just because those also fulfill the concept "city". And therefor the search will only show pictures from Paris or where there is antoher connection to Paris, unless the contributor spammed a picture from Berlin etc. with the keyword "Paris". Some search engines will also include pictures where Paris is only in the title, but not all do that and it would be stupid to rely on that. Even if an image shows up, when the search term is only in the titles, you would have no guarantee that it stays that and also the image may get a better search placement when the word is in the title and the keywords, instead of only in the title or only the keywords.
20
« on: February 10, 2023, 08:20 »
will they detect it and,reject it? would it cause a ban?
Just don't do it, then you will not have to find out the hard way, whether they can detect it and what the consequences are, if they do.
21
« on: January 30, 2023, 21:08 »
Just to be more clear.
After this first positive announcement:
Hi Everyone,
I'm pleased to inform you that the 2021 bonus codes have been applied to all accounts of contributors who qualified. Visit the Adobe Stock Contributor portal. If you qualified, you should see the banner with the unique URL that will take you to redeem your code.
Congratulations to everyone who qualified! We are so grateful to you for your contribution at Adobe Stock. Without you, there is no us.
Stay creative!
Mat Hayward
I would like to hear something like:
Hi Everyone,
I'm saddened to inform you that the 2022 bonus codes have not been applied to all accounts of contributors who would have qualified. Considering the economical environment and challenges within the microstock photography we are not able to prolong this program.
Condolences to everyone who would had qualified. We are so grateful to you for your contribution at Adobe Stock. Without you, there is no us. We need all profit to stay with us and not give away freebies to you contributors.
Stay creative!
Mat Hayward
It would indeed have been nice if Adobe had informed us about not prolonging the program or at least admit to it if asked directly. However, as there never was a 2022 bonus program, there have been no contributors who qualified for it. The text you quote is about the 2021 program. So there is no need to apologies for not giving out bonus codes to people who qualified, as there are no such people.
22
« on: January 26, 2023, 06:36 »
23
« on: January 26, 2023, 06:20 »
David Holz, midjourney CEO, said less than an hour ago that he doesn't like midjourney-generated images being put up for sale through stock agencies. He said that he is seriously considering banning the sale of midjourney-generated images through stock agencies.
I can't find any source for this.
And it would be a complete nonsense, if real: why in the earth Midjourney would donate this market to dozens of competitor?
Also from legal point of view it seems very hard to say "You have commercial rights BUT not for this specific market". David Holz cannot "ban" that market, at the contrary the market can "ban" midjourney, that has been already done by SS and Getty.
By the way... it's a strange world and anything it's possible I would like to read the original source with the words of David Holz
I have no information about the accuracy of the quote, but of course it would be no legal problem to restrict the usage in this way. After all, stock agencies do it all the time. They sell commercial licences for the usage of images, but certain usages require an extended licence and some usages are forbidden even with an extended licence, notably reselling the image at other stock agencies.
24
« on: January 13, 2023, 14:43 »
The tree?
Will the leaves sue me for recognizing themselves?
The tree sheperds, the Ents, might sue you. Probably at the Entmoot in Fangorn. Lawsuits involving the Entmoot can be very expensive and extremely time consuming, because the Ents take like forever to say anything at all, let alone more complicated stuff. So don't take a lawyer who charges by the hour! 
25
« on: January 11, 2023, 22:17 »
have you even bothered to read the thread before joining U in posting blatantly false information? the first posts are about the 2022 codes that were sent out.
No, they are not. The very first posting explicitly states that the codes for 2021 have been sent out. They were sent out in 2022, but for 2021. After that, no further information has been given out about whether there will be a bonus program for 2022 (or 2023), except the statement that there is no information yet. And as has been discussed in this thread, it is highly unlikely that there will be a program for 2022. There might be one for 2023, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
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