I have a combination of several sites and I am still working on it:

http://miklav.com - my main personal site / portfolio. I plan to change the gallery and links under photos

http://miklav.blogspot.com - my blog about photography and life in Belgium, covers various topics including fine art prints, and is indexed quite well in google

http://stock.miklav.com - site about earning money online with digital pictures. Not only microstock.

http://belgium.miklav.com - this just a test. Very narrow niche - fine art photo prints related to Belgium, also with link to my stock photos of Belgium on Dreamstime

I like photography, and microstock is a great motivation for me to photograph more and to try different genre.

However having 14 years experience of working in large enterprises (not photography related) I perfectly realize that we are nothing else than raw material suppliers for the agencies. Supplier is important link in the business chain, but one is easily replaceable with another one...   and no, I don't think it has anything close to slave labor.

Realizing that doesn't stop me to appreciate microstock for opening photo business doors for keen amateurs.

I finally made my first sale

took a couple of month... and my portfolio is still small (below 50 pics)

There are many different flavors of MP4. DivX, XviD, mov are the most common examples.

You need to have proper codec(s) installed on you computer to be able to create MP4 file from you NLE software. One of easy solutions is to install a codec pack, such as ffdshow.

Normally you should be able to select one of mp4 codecs in your software package after that.

One of the most useful resources related to video editing/playback is http://www.videohelp.com/

Another useful site is http://www.doom9.org/

come on, it didn't took 30 days for big names to grow up! It takes years, and Yay just started their very first sales this month, i.e. 2nd of June.

I think it's a great idea, but other than finding a few of my images at other stock sites, it didn't find anything of mine (lots of things I've found via Google, for example)

I was using the right click on an image search using SS or IS thumbnails. For those of you who found a lot of images in use, what did you use as the source image if it wasn't the watermarked comp from one of the stock sites?

I believe it works better using higher-res non-watermarked picture as a source. I have found even a couple heavily-manipulated pics: http://miklav.blogspot.com/2008/05/tineye-image-search-service.html

for me it isn't doing great, but it's ok. Similar to Fotolia and to 123rf. Much better than crestock or featurepics (or LO).

For several months already StockXpert has been in my top 3.

Same for me!

whether the microstock stops operation or not depends on how it is funded. While LO was driven by investor' money, some of the other (small) stocks are run by 1-2 people in their spare time. If they generate enough money to cover the expenses (which aren't very high for such type of business) they continue operating for quite a while. Until the owners loose their enthusiasm.

Geckostock has never been high above the horizon and is run by one guy. Not sure if it will survive.

Scanstock is run by two enthusiasts at their spare time, and they indeed don't have much money for advertising and for site development.

I am not so sure Canstock will stop soon. Although it isn't doing good it is there for quite a while - so I would guess they manage to bring the ends together.

I am not sure about Crestock future. They were relying on investor's money in the beginning, and they don't seem to sell very well...

Unfortunately, I use Aperture to manage my images and keywords and it sorts keywords automatically - so i have no way, unless i go into each file manually edit the IPTC data, to satisfy Fotolia's desires... therefore i don't upload much there and i lose out.

You can change words order while putting category and model release on fotolia website - yet it would mean longer time and more manual work, but it's a bit easier than editing IPTC data.

By the way some other stock sites do treat first keywords as more important (although counting all of them in the search); and some stock sites increase the weight of a word in search in case the same word is used in description and in keywords - but I don't remember all those details.

The 5D produces better quality photos than a 1.6x crop camera.  The sensor is better, the colour reproduction is better. 

I don't think this is correct as a general statement. 5D is indeed better quality than 350D or 20D. However the quality comparisons with 40D that I've seen aren't any better for 5D - the quality is basically the same! Sometimes 40D is even better thanks to 14-bit processing...

Yes you get wide angle with 24mm lens, but on the other hand EF-S 10-22 is quite compact and light which you can never get on full-frame...

With the latest generation of cropped SLRs the advantages of full frame camera are much more doubtful for me than ever before...

Well, there is a simple strategy - just put 7 most relevant words in the beginning. That's what I am doing when filling the IPTC field. It doesn't matter for other stocks, but sets it right for Fotolia.

However, in case your image can't be found at all with any of the keywords, give it first a couple of days (for indexing). If it still can't be found - write to support and they will force indexing.

Quote from: MikLav on April 04, 2008, 06:57

my images from V1 were fixed several months ago when I contacted support.

Did you have to supply the numbers of all images that were not found, or did you just write something along the lines of "Please fix my portfolio..."?

It was done for all portfolio, I didn't provide them each individual number