Everyone was going to pull their ports or stop uploading. The question is how many actual did it??

I did, I dropped FT long before I went back exclusive with iStock.

Posted this over there, thought I would share here as well:

So as to the 1.4 million credits, look at it from a money perspective. Lets say the average credit is between $0.75 and $1.50, this should be fairly reasonable and very generous if iStock was offering large corporations that low of a credit price compared to their standard prices.

If you aren't making iStock between $750,000 and $2,100,000 dollars per year, they aren't going to give you more than 40% ( $300K and $840K). How many exclusive contributors do you think are actually pulling in that kind of cash? How many non-exclusives?

If you want to make it back up to the 40% royalty level at 150,000 credits, you have to bring in between $112,500 and $225,000 of which you would get between $45K and $90K. How many contributors do you think can actually match that?



The average price per credit for my sales this year is $1.28 With that number, I would have to bring in $191,584.58 to meet 40% which would net me $76,663.83. If I was two or three credits shy, and only brought in $191,580 , I would only get $67,054.60 at 35%. That is an extra $9,609.23 in iStock's pocket if I miss the target by a few credits (assuming I manage to match the sales again the following year).

To even get to 35% for next year (where I am currently), I will have had to bring in $51,200 by the end of this year, of which I would get to keep $17,920

Yep, they'd have to sell 1.4M credits worth just to get back to 20%.

http://www.istockphoto.com/forum_messages.php?threadid=251812&page=1

Basically, you get x% royalties based on how many credits were used to download your files the past year.

As a gold exclusive, next year my royalty will drop 5% based on the new plan, even after I finally hit diamond.

Mine is my new photography portfolio.  I've also used it to read bedtime stories to the kids, watch Netflix, surf the web, control my media center (TV) computer remotely, listen to music, find nearby wifi, check the inclination of my monitor, work with the 4yo on tracing letters, play air hockey with the 4yo, used Star Walk to point out to my wife exactly which direction Pluto was through the floor/Earth, look up a definition, log into a server to move a file, tweet of course, and my wife used it to record a meeting she was going to transcribe.

Its a big iPhone, thats a good thing, and its stunningly fast.  I suppose I could have done all that with a netbook, but not as easily.  My poor iPhone must be feeling neglected, but having a bigger screen makes everything so much easier.

I would throw them out.   They appear to be batteries of some kind, with part of the internal anode exposed

I'll throw in another for DeepMeta, it works well, and has a lot of features that can make life easier on you.  It is far better than manually uploading through the web pages on iStock, and less time consuming. 

For white balance, use a white balance card or shoot RAW and adjust the balance in post.  For exposure, use your camera's exposure meters and histogram, and make tiny adjustments in post.  Examples would be very helpful, hard to help if we can't see what you are talking about.

It also sounds like you don't have a lot of experience with your camera gear (based on your rejection reasons and questions about white balance, exposure, etc).  Probably your best bet is to read the manual that came with your camera.

Trad agencies were very arrogant and repeling with new applicants.

Its the sole reason I am in the microstock world at all.  Relatives in the photography biz asked how I could stomach selling photos for so little.  Well, they were the only place that would take me.

Back on topic, I still say everyone should opt in a single sunset photo, and make ThinkStock the worlds largest sunset photo collection.

I am not in the exclusive program yet, but all of my images have been off the other sites the entire month (except Dreamstime, where most of my port was off and the stragglers have been removed slowly the whole month).

iStock Jan 2010 for me was +145% sales and +199% royalties compared to Jan 2009, and Jan '09 was fairly strong on its own.  In fact this Jan would have been #3 in earnings compared to 2009.

I've been using Extreme III 4GB cards for the most part.  I like the smaller cards for most things so I don't risk losing everything with one faulty card.  Plus the older smaller cards can be pretty affordable.