I am new to 123rf and so far there have been 2 sales. I can find the monthly and daily statistics but where can I see which pics have been sold? Is there also a views stats like at Fotolia?

Thanks for your advise, Jochen

Update: SS rejected all 10 pics due to poor composition while they are my "bestsellers" at FT. My plan B is to submit next month again 10 pics which where rejected by FT. It seems to be like a lottery anyway. But since I am registered I uploaded 3 videos and wait for acceptance/reject message.

123rf has accepted my new batch of all 15 pics which where rejected by FT. Here I uploaded also the 3 videos (which where rejected by FT)

http://de.123rf.com/profile_buddelbini

At iStock I passed successfully the quiz and submitted 3 sample pics. Waiting for result.

@ Oldhand: At our 2.800 sqm compound are several residential and commercial buildings constructed. At present there are 7 households with about 25 persons aged 1-84 years living there. Plus several pigs, dogs (Dobermann, English Bulldog, Rottweiler and Labrador plus mixtures of all...), cats, chicken, roosters, rabbits, pigeons, ducks, frogs, lizards and sometimes a snail. It`s like a zoo. One of our youngsters is studying vetenarian and takes care of all animals. Unfortunately there is no caretaker for some of the noisy and drunk humans...

@ all: Thanks for your helpfull comments. In the meantime I tried to improve the quality and FT is now accepting about 80% of my submissions, the actuall portfolio is 369 pics, 52 had already sales . The other day I registered at 123rf and submitted 10 pics which have been rejected by FT. I was very much suprised that all 10 have been accepted by 123rf.

The plan is now to submit first the rejected FT pics and then those from FT with sales or many views. I am aware that I have to further improve the quality before I will try SS and iStock.

There is a technical issue where I need your advises: I found a very nice motif, a coconut tree in front of my 3rd floor bedroom. That means the coconuts are in a horizontal position to the camera which is very unusual. These photos where rejected by FT. I introduced that in the FT forum and the advise there was that my kit objective is not suitable because of the approx. 4 meter distance. I am still scared to invest a lot of money for a better objective. But 123rd was accepting the photo. Now I am confused if it is realy a lens problem. What is your opinion?

Cheers, Jochen

Hi Poncke,

thanks for the tip. I have just registered, passed successful the photographer test and are now FTP uploading some photos. Review time is 30 days.

When checking the stock I found much more German signs rather than in FT, but almost nothing simmelar to my style. We have to wait and see.

I think it is like Mantis explained. So far I did not tried other agencies because I do not have yet so many different themes to fill up the 10 samples at SS. I was just concentrating on the signs, backgrounds and motifs from our tropical farm because I am most time of the year at our little factory in the Philippines while our family business in Germany is managed by our 3 daughters.

The good thing here is that I do have a helper, a young guy who is very talented in PS editing. That is a great help for me.

Best regards from the tropical office, Jochen

Hi, I am a newbie here and like to ask for some advice. Since more than 30 years I am running a mail order business in Germany. Some month ago I deceided to improve the the old, poor quality photos in our online shop. Since these are thousands I can not affort a professional photographer. Instead, I bought a Canon 550D, spotlights and other equipment, studied the basics in photography. With every session the photos became better and to check the quality I submitted some to Fotolia.

One of our product lines are metal signs. In my research I found out that there are not so many simmerlar motifs at the microstock agencies. For sure it is a niche market and it requieres a large quantity of photos in order to generate significant sales. Since the stockphotos are like byproducts the cost of production is very minimal, mostly my time consumption for uploading.

Here my problem starts: FT is accepting only a part of my photos, more than 50% are rejected for technical reasons. This is very hard to understand because mostly the photos are from the same design series and session, same settings and quality. There is no system in accepting and rejecting. Very confusing.

The question is, how can I built up an almost complete portfolio?

Here my actual FT portfolio

http://au.fotolia.com/p/200905542

A good example for the problem are the white, oval doorplates. Only this 4 where accepted, all for bathroom / toilet doors. But all other like kitchen, guestroom etc. have been rejected.

Thankls a lot and best regards, Jochen