I see increase in SS and in StockXpert, and in DT.

September was BME at Crestock with 13 sales (in the past 1.5 years I only saw 2-6 sales per month). It is still very low but at least I see progress and motivation to upload the rest of my portfolio.


iStockphoto    12%
ShutterStock   28%
StockXpert     23%
Fotolia         9%
Dreamstime     13%
BigStockPhoto   4%
123royaltyfree  5%
Other           7%

I've published an illustrated step-by-step skin retouching tutorial in my blog.

The article focuses on how to clean skin effects, and how to do edits like a nose form. Skin smoothing technique isn't included and will be described separately.

Your feedback is welcome - either here or under the main article at http://miklav.blogspot.com/2008/07/beginners-skin-retouching-tutorial.html

you can upload via ftp; and there is a possibility of group edit which is particularly useful for images with the same category; and/or for images with the same model release

Yeah when I saw empty fields I thought it wasn't the case at my first attempt, but then I thought it's just my bad memory. Good to hear that IPTC is used; and hope you will find what's the issue with the upload. Email sent.

I just stopped with canstock - no single sale since January.

I don't see a reason to stop with any site that makes regular sales, even low.

Crestock is probably the lowest earner for me, but it brings sales regularly even with small portfolio - so I plan to upload my complete portfolio there.

123 and BS are doing better so I already have complete portfolio there...

With Yay I only had 2 sales so far, but I am going to give them a good time, at least several months.

Not sure about FP - they are doing better than canstock, but sales are very rare and random. May be I will stop with them too - they didn't really take off and they unlikely will...

I've got my first sale and I am pleasantly surprised - it was sold as a package of business card and graphic image, and therefore the payment is much higher

For me StockXpert is within the top 3 earner, so for StockXpert I would say definitely "yes".

123 and BS are quite far behind, but their performance isn't neglectable. It's better than Crestock, Most, snapvillage, featurepics and many others.

Fotolia has drawbacks as was mentioned, but financially it performs better than 123rf and BigStock.

I keep track of all my uploads and rejections in one single Excel table. One line per file, one column per microstock. Cell content shows in different colors whether the file is ready for upload, uploaded and waitng, accepted or rejected. Works fine for me so at the moment I have no desire to spend time learning any dedicated microstock management software.

The main advantages of that method is that is allows so see which files are rejected by multiple stocks (i.e. I made a bad job); and it allows to track submissions visually, for example mix uploads from different sessions to avoid sending several "similar" files to one stock at the same time. It also makes it easy to add a new stock to the list.

It is a bit time consuming to track all acceptance/rejections, but it isn't a problem with my current upload rate. If I manage to produce significantly more pictures per month I would consider changing my tracking system...

I am a bit surprised they are doing that in less than 1 year from the (real) start. Usually new business doesn't take off until year 3...

добро пожаловать

the new forum is notably slower

Hi Mikhail,

thanks for your response. Here is one of them: http://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup/in-insert/1399103-dvd-buttons.php?id=1399103

I don't think composition has anything to do in this case. I suppose they meant "we don't want this type of pictures"...

I agree that to some degree all sites need that.

However the most sensitive to new uploads are Shutterstock, Stockxpert and Dreamstime (at least for me).