For me its simple - castles were build centuries ago. NO current owner has rights to limit shooting the castle from public place as they didnt build it, designed it or anything else. Many castles in Europe are owned by the state itself and as long as there is no PR need for shooting castles in law, no bureau or office is allowed to sign a PR for you! This is simply insane. In almost every country is allowed to shoot even private modern buildings from public. 90% of current MR and PR crap requirements were made by agencies and not by the law. This is just another step in creating paranoia...

I have the same experience - some yes, some no. Its absolutely random. The most funny is the fact that my best sellers are travel shots from Norway.

All micro has "no travel" disease and often reject such pictures as "low commercial value", while they proudly accept isolated apple - aproximately 120.000 in their collection... kinda weird thinking. Recently Ive decided to invest much more effort in Alamy and personal marketing regarding travel shots.

Overall travel photos on microstock are very very weak. So its definitely crap that they are saturated with travel pictures. Of course I do not mean snaps but there are thousands and thousands of places very poorly or not at all offered by microstock.
The things not mentioned and really saturated are: businesmen shaking hands, zillions of ppl on white in every existing position, isolated fruit, flowers and other common crap, abstract backgrounds, details of PC, cellphone etc...

I see one huge problem with all micros, Zazzle, Cafepress etc. - they expect US to advertise. Even microstock gets huge revenue from free links and advertisement of its contributors, they provide "great tools" to promote not "your portfolio" but them.

I expect agency which gets 70-80% from my sale to do advertising on their behalf. Same with Zazzle, Cafepress, FAA - why . would I join them, pay them comission or store maintanance fee and then do ALL advertising myself? I can build my own website which is much much easily developed regarding SEO and it will be great place for my customers and Im safe about suddently changed fees, policies, webdesign and other nasty things. Im such case, I would definitely rather invest a little more to set up my own business rather then doing this.

Al-qaeda was founded in 80s by CIA in Afghanistan to fight against russian invasion. So there is no real terrorist organisation like Al-qaeda - its just all media crap. Most so called terorrist are logic result of the US invasions and takeover of independent business and countries. Regarding results - US pays several times more for "war against terrorism" then it pays for cancer or heart-attack problems research, while "terorrist" kill less ppl then are killed in cars every day in US only... isn't it silly? There are more ppl killed by heart atack from obesity, overfeeding and bad lifestyle every DAY in US then "terorrists" kill in the whole year worldwide...

There was exactly NO terorrism in Iraq before US invasion and Taliban in Afghanistan banned nearly all opium production - after US invasion, Iraq became extremely dangerous country and Afghanistan is producing most of worlds heroine. What a coincidence...

Bin Laden was not seen for at least decade and they suddenly kill him and bury the body into the sea. And they suppose ppl will trust this story? OMG!

90% of pictures could be properly described with less then 15 keywords. Just Cutting keywords from 50 to 20 could solve most of the problem. There will be simply too tight space for serious spamming and everyone will be forced to think about keywords instead of blindly copying from other images.

Second, inspectors should check for keyword spam and use temporary bans, search penalisations etc. without hesitation. This could also help alot. On the other hand using "controlled vocabulary" and other crap like IS is the way to hell for sure.

All images with resultion under 4Mpix should be deleted from any agency ASAP, selling or not. And why? Because most search algorithms prefer selling pictures but especially on IS there are TONS of old crap uploaded in 2005-2006 with horrible quality but with good selling history from early years of MS. Such pictures are killing much better new pictures. Thats why I have 300 pics online on IS and 200 sales in 3 years and there are 100 pictures portfolios from 2005-2006 with thousands or even tenths of thousands of sales.

I do submit to IS but as said, I do not give a * about creating IS friendly photos. I simply send 18 pictures per week and dont care about how many they reject.

I do not understand badmouthing Dreamstime - they lowered commision only 5% for level 0 images - ALL other images are level up and same commision as before! In fact level 0 behaves as level 1 before, just the commison was cut 5%, which is pretty insignificant compared to raise of the rest. More problematic are weekly subscription packages but we should judge it after month or two and not 5 days after they announced it. I think noone can really predict the result of this subs and credit changes TOGETHER.

On the other hand I see really idiotic rejections on FT all the time (70% rejected compared to 70% accepted everywhere else including IS), their silent commision cuts and very nasty baheviour of IS. In fact DT overcome IS last month about 2x - it didnt happen anytime before.

That is NOT interview but PR article!

I had no problems to get 70-80% accepted by SS - since end of november I always got 70-80% rejected. Most because of pretty disputable reasons. Suddenly everything is out of focus, low commercial value and blahblah - of course exactly same pictures are accepted on IS, DT and FT and many of them were accepted also on Alamy.

Probably new batch of editors, new training, policy update or something...

I think many folks underestimate power of this. Lets see, there are 273 million of photographers (according to SS todays stats) and about 10% of them are really active contributors. If just half of them decide to pull their links from website, its 13000-14000 photographers. We can suppose that most of them will pull at least 2 links (personal website, phorum link etc.) but more likely each will pull 10 or even more links. So in the worst scenario, aprox 27000 links to IS and FT will disappear. Even this is a huge blow for them, imagine if most of us have much more links then just 2. This will be double hit - first lost referred buyers and photographers (whats worse for IS and FT, we can forward them to their competition!) and second it will make serious blow to SEO and ranking in search engines.

Eg. one photographer with several hundreds posts in this phorum and IS and FT links in his signature pulls it - suddenly several hundred links are gone from ONE SINGLE photographer. Many ppl will pull several links from their personal websites, facebook, twitter, local language phorums (most of us are worldwide) and so on - this could in fact result in up to several hundreds thousands links deleted. Not something FT or IS will be proud of and it will hurt them quite a bit.

Well, I think it works itself pretty good. Firstly major of sales occur on photographer-client basis, not agency-client. Second, from agencies micro is just tiny part. Third - did you see microstock images in Google images results? Me not...

Technically, every item (even those cheap generic one) has its designer, manufacturer and owner. It doesnt matter who and how made it, simply its their design and you cant use it as you like, even if it is your property.

Doesnt matter if it is main subject or not, if it is just detail of the car headlight or whole car - every single part of the item is also designed by someone. You bought the item to use, not the rights to the design! Its exactly the same as photographing Mona Lisa and then calling it art or derivate work etc. - you simply based your own work on someone elses property and design.

In fact we do not apply IP law up to these insane levels but based on pure law and not logic, it could be done. Microstock agencies first didnt care and they still have tons of copyrightet cars, coins, post stamps, paintings, notebooks, cell phones, PC parts, banknotes etc. - all this stuff was created by someone and in most countries is strictly illegal to shoot eg. post stamps or banknotes and cameras, laptops and cellphones are of course copyrighted exactly the same way as car designs. Doesnt matter if you removed the logo - every photographer will instantly recognize eg. Canon camera, everyone recognize Apple laptop or Lamborghini car - with logo or not...
They do not accept some of this stuff anymore and I think its perfectly ok - it protect also us if we are too stupid to post some problematic stuff. They sometimes are too picky and reject pictures which are perfectly ok - then just resubmit or give up.

Yuri in his last Interview (John Lund web or so) mentioned some changes are necessary in micro. I have my personal thing I call "microstock dilema":

First problem is micro demands higher and higher quality, second they cut commisions every year (at least one or two agencies - 2011 just started and FT and IS already did!) and third, they require more and more pro pictures requiring pricy locations, models or studio setups or very niche pictures.
The problem is, the tight niche pics do not sell like hotcakes and despite being cheap, they will never cover the costs. The "real stock photos" or simly great pictures refered by some in this thread often require so pricy setup, retouching etc. they will never make it either. Plus add the fact that guys from China or India do not give a * about copyright and can copy your superb pictures within days for 10% of your costs. This is going to dead end. Im also very curious how will microstock sites solve this but unless they do serious changes, this problem will be bigger every day! We are not in 2005-2006 - the market isnt the same nowadays and what worked in 2005 doesnt work anymore.