I recommend Pond5. Doesn't sell often, but you get 50% of the price you set. If you do travel, I also recommend Alamy.

Quote from: sharpshot on August 31, 2015, 04:40

A decent smartphone should be as good as a compact from a few years ago and I have seen posters from my old compact.  Just started with Stockimo, like the look of that collection.

Isn't that the app by Alamy where they only pay you 20% of the license fees whereas you get 50% when uploading with them through their website? This was something that had me confused when I had a look at it. Honestly asking for your experience and why you made that decision to supply them with images through the app.

That is true and, quite honestly, ridiculous.

If you are already a member of Alamy though you get the normal 50%.

If you want Harvard University campus why don't you search Harvard University campus. https://prime.500px.com/search/keywords=Harvard+University+campus Buyers are smart enough to figure that out, why can't you? A one word search is not a good test of a search. Many word search is much better. The search fails the most on IS. If it's not an exact match to all the words it returns, no results.

One word searches, especially for big names, are super common. Just check your dreamstime sales history (they tell you the search term). Or try Alamy measures, lots of one word searches (which, considering how terrible Alamy is with one word searches, is surprising). And as I said, they can work very well, as they do on Shutterstock.

After going through the all my images to see what collection they're in and doing some more tests I must say that I am pretty unhappy with the way this was done. Or rather: I just don't understand what 500px is going for here.

(1) The only one of my images which ever sold for a large amount on 500px (as I said before, $275 for me, so my calculator tells me it must have been a pretty impressive $392.8571428571429 gross sale price) is one of the relatively few of my images that are now in Core. It is somewhere on page four of the search for all main keywords. Really? A customer willing to pay almost $400 bucks for an RF image is no vote of confidence to you? I don't get it.

(2) The collections make absolutely no sense in general. Prime images don't look better. Prime images aren't better fits to what people look for.

In fact, I have a little pet test that I just happened to find while searching for an image one day: I search for "Harvard". This search is a great test because it reveals the weaknesses most sites' search engines have with strong, distinctive single keyword searches. I would wager that like me, 99.9% of people searching that single keyword want a nice representative image of Harvard University campus. Now, on sites that are absolutely terrible with single word searches (I am looking at you, Alamy), what will come up is tons of images of vials in a lab or whatever, and of a vintage airplane that is apparently called Harvard. The effect is that people have to wade through tons of things (or bother to improve their search) to find what they want. Try the same thing on Shutterstock, and the relevance of images is awesome.

The effect with 500px Prime's new system is absolutely ridiculous. Search for this one keyword only in Prime collection images, and instead of the many great Harvard campus images on 500px being drowned out by the wrong stuff, they don't show up at all, and there is no trace of their existence. There are only four results. These: https://prime.500px.com/search/keywords=harvard&availability=prime_collection So instead of thinking "there is just too much stuff here and the system doesn't get what I want" one is left thinking "this site has very few images and apparently none of them relate to my needs".

TL;DR: What are you even trying to do here, 500px?

The site hasn't become more searchable, and the new lower price tier still isn't cheap enough to be anywhere near competitive with normal (micro)stock. So what are you doing, 500px? I don't get it.

Thumbs up to 500px for jumping in with proactive contributor support.  Makes me want to join.  But please fix the watermarks!  Maybe add a move to center watermark option for contributors who worry about such things.

Ideed! Great support. I personally don't mind the watermark issue, either.

New prices:

Core Collection $35 / $150 / $300
Prime Collection $50 / $250 / $750

Okay, that isn't too bad.

EDIT: Something else: While checking my port to see which image went in which collection, I realized that several of my images are listed as exclusive even though I never marked a single image as such. Has anybody else noticed that problem?

Does 500px say when, in which date,  we can see this two collections. If process of curating of our images is finished or just starts? By the way at this moment we have two collections at 500px. Better images go to 500prime, worse arent approved there. My doubts are that prime collection will be with higher prices,  the same as present.  Worse images, which aren't approved to prime will be moved there as Core collection  in low prices.

500px is not a collection, as it is not up for sale. As for "better images" -- I have literally never had an image not approved at 500px Prime.

Certainly, Fotolia has improved since Adobe took over with regards to compensation.  My RPD had gone up above $0.29/image.

Having said that, I'm not very excited about Adobe's pricing scheme, and I really don't understand how Jonathan Ross and Elizabeth are.  The reason I like SS the best is because I get frequent $90-$120 sales.  The max amount of money I've seen come in from AdobeStock is only $3.60.  I'm concerned that SS will have to change their pricing because of pressures from Adobe, and these high paying SOD from SS will disappear.  Does anyone else feel this way?

In short, yes.

Oh, they are now showing names?!

Congratulations, I was with Getty for several years and they kept promising it will come,year after year...I never saw it...

Getty licenses their content all over the macro world, the other agencies do the same. "ocean" collection is a collection full of files from getty.

Check masterfile,f1online,mauritius, and all the other macros, maybe you will find your files there too.

they don�t mirror everything, looks like they can pick and chose whatever they need.

Thanks! I guess they must have started showing them, it showed up in the "all photos by" thingie at Corbis and it didn't before (even though it has been on Getty for a couple of years).

Quote from: fotorob on June 14, 2015, 07:39

@photosales2015:
Where are you based?
Depending on your location and the location of the agencies using your photos I wonder why you don't use a lawyer to sort this thing out?

Have you ever been through a legal process? Do you even know how incredibly expensive and long-drawn it is? I had one in the past that cost me over $120,000 and was a complete waste. You need a tremendous amount of funds to fight a legal battle like this.

I just want everybody to be aware that this is only true in the U.S. and a few other select countries. In my native Germany, for example, it is almost always worth getting a lawyer to deal with image sleuth.

Was ich mich bei sowas immer wieder frage, woher willst du wissen das dieses Bild(er) nicht lizensiert wurden?
Verkaufe ich ein Bild 100 mal und sehe dieses 101 mal im Internet, woher wei� ich dann welcher eine das Bild nicht rechtm��ig erworben hat?

RM. Da ist es oft einfach herauszufinden. Oder (kommt bei mir oft vor): Die Quellenangabe von Flickr ist dabei.

Mine was travel and generic interiors.

They might feel that they need this sort of thing for the profile picture alone...