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Messages - thenatureguy

Pages: [1] 2 3 4
1
Shutterstock.com / Re: Murdered Shutterstock Forum Refugee Thread
« on: November 27, 2021, 14:54 »
Wow!  I had not been on the SS forum for a while, but still had it bookmarked.  I just tried to follow that bookmark and found it was gone.  I am not really surprised it is gone. There was really nothing left to be said.  Everyone knew that SS had decided to screw its contributors, so it was just a pitty party of people sitting around and talking about how bad it was to be screwed.  I was right in the with the rest.  I have not uploaded to SS since the day they implemented the new stair step policy level base commission ratios.  I have been uploading exclusively to AS. But, due to SS undercutting the prices, I only sell very little on AS.

Oh well.  Happy selling everyone.

2
Shutterstock.com / Re: Will Getty buy Shutterstock?
« on: April 08, 2021, 13:54 »
As long as the Boomer generation survives, there will be a hearty market for paper books.  I have a couple of books on Amazon and make some money on them. Many people prefer reading paper over digital, I myself am one.  I used to subscribe to several print magazines.  Once they went all-digital, I stopped reading them.  It is not only reading digital text that bothers me.  Navigation on a digital device cannot beat picking up a real book and flipping through the pages. Some things are just better in real print. 

Real books will NEVER go out of style because of the simple fact that they do not require batteries, and you cannot just click a button and delete a book from the internet because you disagree with what it says, otherwise known as, "Cancel Culture" that is running amuck all over the web.  There has never in the history of books been a law made banning a paper book that was 100% successful.  That may not prove to be true with things on the internet.  Everything online can be tracked digitally and as the world becomes more unified digitally and establishes universally enforced international standards based on the personal ethics of a few elitist (already happening), they day may come in the future where they may decide that this or that book should not exist, and simply delete it from the web (or at least for all common folk).

Despite all the unfounded, opinion-based, protestations to the contrary, what I said about the used book market is 100% factual.  People are making a lot more money off of selling used books these days than they did 20 years ago.  I said it before, and I will say it again.  "If you don't value your product, nobody else will either."   Regardless of how oversaturated the market is with stock photos, there is a base value for them.  That value may not be hundreds of fo dollars each, but it is not zero either.  That value is whatever it is to make it worth people's time and effort to create the content.  If all the people who right now are not valuing their work, were to pull their content down, overnight, prices for content would shoot up.

As long as the slaves are willing to work for free, what incentive do these companies have to pay more?

3

Please try changing the status to "Ready" and re-start the uploading to Adobe.

It will not allow me to do that. I have tried it, but it just stays red.  Why doesn't Plus tell you what is wrong like SS does?

Could you PM me this file ID in M+ so that I could check what's wrong?


It is not just one file.  It is all new files that I have uploaded to MS+ and used the MS+ Metadata editor to get ready for submission. I will PM you the ID of one of them, but this applies to them all. 

I don't want to have to come to you every time this is a problem with compatibility. I don't have much time to work on microstock, and posting a message here and then waiting for a reply, and going through this whole mess to get the problem fixed, is not worth it. I am not making hardly anything off of microstock, and even writing this message is an inefficient waste of my time, when I could be doing something that is more productive.   

In SS, when there is a compatibility problem with an agency, SS will tell you what the problem is. Why does MS+ not do this same thing?


4
Since I am unable to upload to Adobe using Microstock Plus, and have gotten no answers on here to help me, I decided to download and try stocksubmitter.  Well, it appears that the installer is very old because it has to update 656 differences and fails every time.  This is a brand new installation.  The error says that the process was "Canceled by the user" which is total bunk. I have checked my anti-virus to make sure that stocksubmitter is allowed and it is.

??????

1. The installer downloads only the updater and doesn't download the program itself, because keeping it up to date with a full program installation inside would take too much time, considering how often do we have to update the program in accordance to changes on the agencies websites.
2. If it shows a "Canceled by the user" message then most likely your Windows UAC or antivirus is blocking the update finisher process.
It has to request your permission to update the program files on the hard drive via a standard UAC request. If it doesn't appear then the only possible cause is that it gets blocked by something.
Please check the UAC settings and try disabling the antivirus.

I finally got it to start by disabling the firewall.  It would be nice though if you would design it to where it would start first, and download updates after it started.  This way people could keep working while they wait for an answer on here by you.  Mos programs work that way.  Yours is the only one I have ever used the won't start unless the update process completes.

Oh and BTW, the only reason I download SS is because MS+ is not telling me why it is marking images and Not Ready for upload to AS, and I have gotten no help to my question about this.

5
Shutterstock.com / Re: Will Getty buy Shutterstock?
« on: April 02, 2021, 07:30 »
Books are physical entities you can download a lot of kindle books for free and there are other sites that allow the download many "classics". People seek out individual authors or books. This only applies to a tiny number of photographers so I don't think its a very parallel comparison. People also pay to have their books published.

Okay, have it your way. There is zero hope and anyone who gives a reason why there might be is wrong because you desire that everything they say to the contrary to be wrong because you want it that way, and will dig as deep as you need to to find a way to argue about it.  Geez! Some people's children! ROFL!

6

Please try changing the status to "Ready" and re-start the uploading to Adobe.

It will not allow me to do that. I have tried it, but it just stays red.  Why doesn't Plus tell you what is wrong like SS does?

7
Shutterstock.com / Re: Will Getty buy Shutterstock?
« on: March 31, 2021, 18:28 »

Liekwise. Good conversation.  I have traveled a lot as well, but was not doing serious photography at that time 40 years ago.  I still take pictures though.  I was out at the lake just yesterday with my 600mm lens shooting pictures of coots. Not the best shots but, I just enjoy doing it.

Nice! I got my first camera in the 80's but never got serious about photography til around 2003 as an add-on to my web design side of things, and fell in love with the camera. I discovered stock later as a nice enhancement to shooting events and industrial gigs. I do miss vacation shooting through.

You and I share a lot in common. I also have taken pictures since the 80s,but only family stuff.  It was not until I got into digital photography in 2003 when I got my first serious digital camera, which was the Sony Mavica CD500.  I went with the Mavica CD because, at the time, memory cards were about a dollar a megabit (100MB card = $100).  The Mavicas CD used mini CDs which could hold 200MB and cost about $2 a disc.  I was running a remote Malaria clinic in the Amazon jungle at the time and I needed a camera that I could take hundreds of pictures with, without needing to offload the pictures to free up memory.  The Mavica CD was the only camera that fit that bill, and it was not a bad camera for its time. 5MP and Carl Zeiss lens. Some of my highest-selling pictures today were taken with that lowly camera back then, and I really had no clue what I was doing. But because of the freedom of having unlimited storage with the mini CDs, I could just snap away to my heart's content.  Man, I wish I had the strength and youth to go back and shoot those shots today with my equipment now. I look at those shots often and am just amazed at the opportunities I had back then that I did not appreciate. That is why I continue to take the best shots I can today.  They may be worth nothing to sell, but they are with something to me.

Here is a picture I took in 2003 with that camera.  This is called a Rooster-tailed Cicada.




8
Shutterstock.com / Re: Will Getty buy Shutterstock?
« on: March 31, 2021, 17:40 »
You are misunderstanding me.  Just because books don't sell for a penny on amazon anymore, does not automatically mean they sell for a hundred bucks.  There is a balance. Rarity does equal high value, but abundance does not have to equal zero value. Demand plays a part, but so does valuing your work. 20 years ago, stock images use to sell for hundreds each. That was because photographers that had the capacity to create and upload images were few and there was a ravenous market demand for content.  Honestly, those images were sold way above their value.  Now they are selling way beneath their value. 

There is a value for stock images.  What that value is, is simple to calculate. It is, Cost+Labor+Profit = Value.  The amount of time, energy, and equipment invested in creating the content is part of the value of the content.  But people cannot work for free, they must have food and shelter too, so profit is part of the value.  In order for something to be worth doing, it must be able to sustain you. 

Right now there are tons of people running around wasting endless amounts of time energy and resources to capture photos and sell them at a loss.  With time, when they see that it is is not worth it, they will stop and this well of free slave labor that stock agencies are taking advantage of will begin to dry up. It is already happening.  You are an example of this in that you have tons of images that are worth nothing and you may delete them.  I too, like you have not uploaded any new images for over a year and have many thousands of images on a drive.  How many more are there like us?  Well, this trend will grow, slowly, but it will grow until the agencies will start to cry out for new content and will have to raise prices to bring back creators. How long in the future will this be?  I do not know.  I may not live long enough to see it.  But regardless, there is a value to images.  That value will never be what it once was, and it is definitely what it is now.  The value of images is greater than the cost and labor to create them, that is what it is, and one day the market will reflect this.

I think we are coming to the same point from different directions. Yes, there is value in some/many of the images produced and someday we may see the balance you refer to. I highly doubt it, but it is possible, and I don't think anyone around today will see it. I suspect there will be innovations that make the entire pyramid redundant and kill the industry much the same way micro killed off most of the RM market.

How I value my work is exactly how I did in the beginning when I saw the RM Pros jump into the RF market and devalue quality work. I preferred the original MS premise, b-roll or hobby shots sold to an audience that otherwise either could not afford RM or to hire their own photographer. I tailored my entire RF career around that premise. The extras from paid shoots, my 30 second shoots of my meals, a walk outside, all earning me the exact same as the "pros" who took hours to get that special shot. I've travelled the world a few times on my earnings. :)

Anyway, interesting discussion. Thanks.

Liekwise. Good conversation.  I have traveled a lot as well, but was not doing serious photography at that time 40 years ago.  I still take pictures though.  I was out at the lake just yesterday with my 600mm lens shooting pictures of coots. Not the best shots but, I just enjoy doing it.



9
Shutterstock.com / Re: Will Getty buy Shutterstock?
« on: March 31, 2021, 16:21 »
Well we disagree on one part. I think mass supply or unlimited supply does mean they are worth less than what they were previously worth. As for Amazon, yes, they don't sell for a penny anymore, but an increase in price across the board is not the same as an increase in sales. As an indie author and part of many groups, I can tell you that it is very similar to micro in that you can set whatever price you wish, but it does not necessarily mean it will sell. The volume of new books nowadays does mean that unless you are lucky or spend the effort on marketing, you won't sell at all. So what is is actually worth? I guess it depends on the perspective of buyer vs. seller.

I have over 12k stock photos just sitting on a hard drive and only 5k or so left online. There is no value to me to put them up somewhere for sale. So, they'll sit there til I need the drive for something else, then I will delete them probably. Am I valuing them higher or lower because I wont sell them for pennies?

You are misunderstanding me.  Just because books don't sell for a penny on amazon anymore, does not automatically mean they sell for a hundred bucks.  There is a balance. Rarity does equal high value, but abundance does not have to equal zero value. Demand plays a part, but so does valuing your work. 20 years ago, stock images use to sell for hundreds each. That was because photographers that had the capacity to create and upload images were few and there was a ravenous market demand for content.  Honestly, those images were sold way above their value.  Now they are selling way beneath their value. 

There is a value for stock images.  What that value is, is simple to calculate. It is, Cost+Labor+Profit = Value.  The amount of time, energy, and equipment invested in creating the content is part of the value of the content.  But people cannot work for free, they must have food and shelter too, so profit is part of the value.  In order for something to be worth doing, it must be able to sustain you. 

Right now there are tons of people running around wasting endless amounts of time energy and resources to capture photos and sell them at a loss.  With time, when they see that it is is not worth it, they will stop and this well of free slave labor that stock agencies are taking advantage of will begin to dry up. It is already happening.  You are an example of this in that you have tons of images that are worth nothing and you may delete them.  I too, like you have not uploaded any new images for over a year and have many thousands of images on a drive.  How many more are there like us?  Well, this trend will grow, slowly, but it will grow until the agencies will start to cry out for new content and will have to raise prices to bring back creators. How long in the future will this be?  I do not know.  I may not live long enough to see it.  But regardless, there is a value to images.  That value will never be what it once was, and it is definitely what it is now.  The value of images is greater than the cost and labor to create them, that is what it is, and one day the market will reflect this. 

10
Shutterstock.com / Re: Will Getty buy Shutterstock?
« on: March 31, 2021, 15:02 »

Lol, funny about the Amazon comment (or maybe ironic) since I listed one of my thrillers there today as a free promotion (Flashback, by TR Davis if anyone gets bored). However, I am unsure it will balance out as you say. I think that the future (if there is one) lies with exclusivity and scarcity of specific niches. I think as I've said previously that if there is a tangible and real dollar cost to production, you won't see the images on freebie or discount sites as often.

The bad side is there is a huge collection of these kinds of images that in many cases don't become dated, already available. We've seen that users will choose "free and good enough" as often as they do "expensive and perfect". At least it appears that way.

As a publisher myself, I know all about the limited free giveaway promotion period that amazon offers. But my point stands that you don't see books selling for a penny anymore, and they are way more books available now than when I was selling over 20 years ago.  So mass supply does not have to equal any value you, as many microstock sellers think.  Just because there is an almost unlimited supply of images, does not make those images worth less.  People bought books for a penny on amazon back when I was selling, NOT because they would not pay more, but because that is what sellers were valuing their books at.  People will pay a lot more for pictures then they are now, but why pay more when they can get them for little or nothing, because that is what people are selling them for.

These free sites are not free.  They are making money on ad revenue, because they can make more money from ads, than trying to sell them outright.  Once the market balances out and people can make decent money from selling images, all that content on the free sites will go away.  Those sites only exist because the stock agencies have made it less profitable to sell images than to give them away for free and make money from ads. 

11
Shutterstock.com / Re: Will Getty buy Shutterstock?
« on: March 31, 2021, 14:22 »
The question I rarely see these days is, given the over supply of quality images, plus the growing popularity of free sites is this:

What is a photo actually worth these days? And why?

There is an old saying, "If you don't value yourself, no one else will value you either."   I was a used bookseller back in the early days of Amazon.com when all they sold was books.  I had over 30,000 books for sale.  Like microstock today, the competition was fierce.  Most of my books were listed for sale for $0.01 (One Cent). Not because I wanted to sell them for that, but because that was the going price for 90% of the books on Amazon at that time.  The only way to make money was to save on packaging and take your profits out of that standard S&H fee that amazon automatically tacted on the sale of books. Fortunately, I had some equipment and supplies leftover from a  previous failed company, and through some creative thinking, I was able to save some money and make about $0.25 a book.

So what does this have to do with microstock?  I see the same thing happening as what happened on Amazon.  Everybody is trying to cut everyone else's throat by dropping prices so low that it is not profitable to stay in business. This is exactly what happened on Amazon.com, and eBay as well.  People were selling everything so cheap that nobody could make a profit.  But look at those markets today.  You won't find books on amazon for a penny no more these days.  eBay likewise has balanced out and it is hard to find a steal on their anyone as well.  At some point, those markets figured out that trying to kill each other off by undercutting prices, was only hurting themselves.  Those markets eventually balanced out to where people could at least make a living doing them.

I think the same will happen with microstock.  Eventually, these companies will stop trying to undercut each other because it will get to the point that the prices are so low that no one can make a living at it.  Then the market will start to find a balance where it at least make it worth the effort to do it.  Right now, no one is making money.  Not real money.  If you calculate the investment in equipment, and the time spent, 99% of people would earn far more flipping burgers at McDonalds. If your cost plus labor does not equal profitability equal or greater than minimum wage, you are losing money doing it. Plain and simple.

I believe, or at least I hope, the market will balance out, and the people that create the content will start to value their work and refuse to sell it for pennies.  Because if you don't value your work, nobody else will either. Once photographers realize the truth of this statement and band together and say, NO MORE!, things will get better for everyone.




12
Since I am unable to upload to Adobe using Microstock Plus, and have gotten no answers on here to help me, I decided to download and try stocksubmitter.  Well, it appears that the installer is very old because it has to update 656 differences and fails every time.  This is a brand new installation.  The error says that the process was "Canceled by the user" which is total bunk. I have checked my anti-virus to make sure that stocksubmitter is allowed and it is.

??????


13
I am just getting a red bar for adobe and the message "Stock not ready.  I have redone the metadata multiple times, and nothing changes.  When I used to use StockSubbmitter, it would tell me what was wrong so I could fix it, but this information is not appearing in Microstock.plus.

Please Help.

14
I took a break from stock for a while to focus more on my youtube channel, but continued to shoot photos and store them up for when I had some time.  Yesterday I tried to submit some new photos using Microstock Plus and I keep getting the error, "Stock is not ready".  Now, I went through and did all the metadata and at first, it said it was ready to upload, but not is says it is not (red bar) but is not telling me what is wrong, or what I need to fix.  Can anyone provide some insight here?

15
You're with the top selling micro sites so not many options beyond that. Maybe Alamy but they've declined to micro prices along with low volume.

Consider selling art prints on Print On Demand sites. Nature is saturated there as well but your work seems more artsy than commercial so you may find opportunity there.

I have been thinking about doing this.  I read somewhere about selling framed prints, but I can't remember the site they said you could do this.  What are some good sites to sell prints on?

16
So,  I am sure this has been asked before, but things change so I thought I would ask this question as being relevant now in 2020.  I currently have my stuff on SS, AS DT, and RF.  My best performers are SS and AS.  DT has done very little and 123RF, well, it is not even worth mentioning.  But even what I make on SS is not really worth the time and effort, I put it, but I have a day job, and enjoy what I do photographically, so there's that.   If you want to see some samples of my work, you can watch this video montage I made for Easter to cheer people up. https://youtu.be/WfHEt7AnujM

I am just wondering there is a better place for my work to be than microstock?  Looking for ideas?

17

It's not easy if you would like to do it manually.
You can do it in the SS interface.

The option in the interface can only be applied to ALL agencies, not to specific ones.  It would be awesome of you added to option to adjust the status of each individual image to each agency.

18

All of the non-standard metadata is stored in the EXIF UserComment field in an encoded format.

Is there any way to edit this data to mark images as submitted that I know for 100% positive have been submitted by SS, but SS failed to register this information on the image?

19
Shutterstock will reject duplicates, although it is not a great plan to send them many duplicate files. Better to sort out where you are with them and then start clean with M+

Yeah, that is a good idea.  I see that M+ syncs back information to SS about the stats of images.  That is good.  One my hugest battles is keeping track of what has been uploaded and what has not because I have such inconsistent results using SS. I think I am going to like using M+ a lot better.

I have another question.  If I am running SS on a desktop and a laptop (for travel) will M+ sync the stats of images with both installations if they are logged into the same account?  For example.  Say I am traveling and capture a bunch of images that I upload with my laptop.  When I get home I always back up my images to my desktop for safekeeping and long term organization.  Then say, I open this folder of images that were uploaded to M+ on my laptop in my Desktop SS app, will they show the same status as the images in M+?  Is that status information (i.e. ready, uploaded, submitted) stored locally in the image metadata?

All the status information is stored locally in the image metadata, yes. In JPEG previews, specifically.
So if you have a video (for example) on two devices and want to copy the status information and metadata from one of them to another - it's enough to copy the JPEG preview.

What section in the metadata is this information stored?

20
Shutterstock will reject duplicates, although it is not a great plan to send them many duplicate files. Better to sort out where you are with them and then start clean with M+

Yeah, that is a good idea.  I see that M+ syncs back information to SS about the stats of images.  That is good.  One my hugest battles is keeping track of what has been uploaded and what has not because I have such inconsistent results using SS. I think I am going to like using M+ a lot better.

I have another question.  If I am running SS on a desktop and a laptop (for travel) will M+ sync the stats of images with both installations if they are logged into the same account?  For example.  Say I am traveling and capture a bunch of images that I upload with my laptop.  When I get home I always back up my images to my desktop for safekeeping and long term organization.  Then say, I open this folder of images that were uploaded to M+ on my laptop in my Desktop SS app, will they show the same status as the images in M+?  Is that status information (i.e. ready, uploaded, submitted) stored locally in the image metadata?

21
Okay.  I have a few questions about M+

1. When I upload to M+ via SS, the status indicator in SS is not registering the agency stats.  Is this normal?  If it is, how do I track what has and has not been upload to M+ via SS?

2. Since I have had so much problem with SS, I am not sure what has or has not been uploaded using SS.  If I upload images to M+ and submit images to agencies, that are duplicates of images that have already been uploaded via SS, what happens?

22
@thenatureguy

Yes, it's using exactly the same subscription model and they share the same accounts.
So you can use your SS account to log into M+.
They can also be integrated to keep using SS interface while the uploading and submission process is actually performed by M+ under the hood.
You can also sync the agencies login credentials and releases database from SS to M+.

===

123rf: if the files have _ready_ status after uploading it means they were not really uploaded - there was some error that you can check using the "Errors" button.

Okay. I'll give it a try.


23
At the moment it costs the same as Stock Submitter (and no more if you use both). It basically means that if they support the agency, then the app uploads just one copy of the file to their servers and they onward upload and submit to the agency. Maybe not a great advantage with still photos, but it makes a big difference with videos

Steve

SS is free up to 33 images per agency, which I seldom go over.  So M+ would be free for me as well......?

24
Contact them, they always pay

Maybe you dont fill the tax form, or your payment method is not properly configured.

I know that my payment settings are correct.  I have contacted them, but the answers have been generic, like yours, not specific.  You know, "Form Answers" that they send out to everyone.  My question is, if there was a problem, should they not have sent me an email about it?  I have been a contributor for over a year.

The only thing I can find that might be the problem is my tax form.  My name on my tax form only has my first and last name, not my full legal name.  This is because when I signed up for SS, I only used my first and last name to create my SS account. SS uses the account name as the name on the TAX form and will not allow me to alter or change it in any way.  I tried submitting a new tax form, but SS autofills it with the name on my SS account and will not let me add my middle name to it. So there is nothing I can do. 

25
I have been with SS a while and have earned a few hundred, but it is just accumulating in my SS account and never gets paid out to me.   I have my payout settings set to pay at $50.  I have everything set up correctly, but I never get a payout for SS.  What is going on?

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