I might consider it if I was already at the Diamond level.  As it is I'm a good 5800 off of that mark, so 33,000 to go makes that a lot less attractive given that many of my iStock sales came in the earlier years.  There is no way to estimate how much your sales will increase by going exclusive, and there is no way to estimate how much your sales may drop by staying independent.  We simply won't know anything until it rolls around and we see how things change.  

That's just how iStock works, sometimes changes are good, sometimes bad, and sometimes everything changes with no net differences in the results, but you never know for sure until it happens.  So ebb and flow, wait and see, F5, yadda yadda yadda.

I agree with that, image specific exclusivity would be very tempting on the iStock front.  I just think it would be too difficult for them to police, should some people be tempted to put similar but not identical images up elsewhere.  I think that is the main reason we see them sweetening the pot for all-out exclusives, and I expect we will never see the oh-so-desirable image exclusivity at iStock.  Its just too hard to make sure people aren't cheating with piecemeal exclusivity.

I'm on pace this year to have added another 600 or so by the end of the year, but I've had several long periods where I barely uploaded anything.  Looking at this again, about 40% of my portfolio are people shots now, but 80% of those shots have been added since June of last year.  I didn't really take that into account before, but my sales have been up this year on all the sites.  Not sure if that is due to uploading a lot more new images, or if it is the fact that they are images of people.

Either way, I agree with you on the best month ever, June has been particularly good to me in a time when I normally see sales slide quite a bit.

Hardly any sales recently.  Its to the point where it almost isn't worth my time and bandwidth to upload photos there, despite a very easy and fast process to get photos onto their site.

I got hit with another three subscription sales today, this time all from photos.com.   Let me know what you find out from support.  All but one of of the sub sales has been large sized of course.   

Just a heads up that it looks like iStock may have removed this workaround.  There was a cookie named iStock_DatacenterID.  In the past it was being set to a value of 2 by the upload page, and when you went to the forums it would set the value to 1.   With the value set to 1, the upload page is able to pull the IPTC information correctly, when it is set to 2, it does not.   The forums used to successfully reset the cookie value to 1, and it is no longer doing so.  I just tried removing that cookie and refreshing the forum page and it now sets the bad value.  So, I tried pulling up a specific forum, in this case the Help forum (Discussion worked as well, probably others), and it set the cookie correctly.  I was then able to go from the help forum directly to the upload page, with the keywords successfully filled in.

So, new workaround:   When you open your browser, click on forums, and go into a specific forum to get the correct cookie.   Then click Upload in the navigation bar and you should be able to upload (or edit previous uploads) with all your info showing up.   

2008 Year:

 IS   39.6%
 SS  35.4%
 DT  16.7%
 FT    3.1%
StockXpert   2.3%
123   1.5%
 FP    1.2%

You could try these guys:  http://www.photographersdirect.com

You would have to ditch all of your microstock though.

Looking at the grid they provide, it suggests that purchasing EL will be available on all StockXpert cross-content regardless of size.  I believe the confusion is just from the way they worded the explanation of sizes in their email.   Still, it would be nice to have confirmation one way or the other.

I've got a ticket in to support, as far as I could tell you had to do them one at a time.  The terms and conditions says that they will remove them though, if the agreement is terminated, so I sent in a support ticket terminating the agreement.  Still waiting on their response.

Oh good...I didn't realize they had finally obscured the SSN.  Thanks for the info, Joann.   

I think Joann was referring to blurring the ID number on the drivers license, not the SSN, but I could be mistaken.

It might actually be illegal for them to store the information the way they do.  I asked them to list the laws or other legal requirements they were attempting to meet by collecting my personal information, and asked them to describe the methods used to protect it (reasonable requests in my opinion) and they basically told me I was nobody special and 
they had 60,000 photographers who didn't  have a problem with it.

Then they had the gall to tell me to remove my portfolio myself online as a response to my request that they remove it from their site.

I put in a request to support to see if there is a faster way than manually deleting them.  Otherwise its going to take awhile.  Luckily I had cashed out recently so they are only stealing about $100 in unpaid royalties from me.