My local dance club informed me that I was being replaced by another photographer that would shot their dance performances for FREE!

I use to charge $200 for a full two hour session plus process the images (Usually around 200 images). The guy that replaced me works as a software engineer for Microsoft and has a Nikon D800e- his photos were very bright and clear at ISO 400 where my Canon had to use ISO 800 or higher.  Thus the dance club got a better photographer and for FREE. Thus another potential income fades away from me. Looks like 2014 is going to be a rough one...

Sorry to hear that. I kinda know how you feel. If they can find someone to do it for nothing they will...the question is rather the guy will continue to do it for free after experiencing all the work that is involved.

Oh and just because he has a bigger and better camera does not mean he is a better photographer....

Any one have this problem? I keep hitting the submit button and still get the same error message. It takes me back to the edit page and doesn't show me what the error is. It doesn't matter rather I try to submit one image or all 24, it says the same thing. It did the same thing the other day and I'd save my work and sign out and sign in and all the saved descriptions and keywords would be gone. I did that three times before it finally went through having to redo description and keywords. I'm scared to death to leave the page for fear it will be all gone again. I am getting very frustrated.

do you think your sales are declining due to Zazzle policy or competition? Perhaps, like cafe press, our micro images are there for much less, forcing us to compete with ourselves? Just thinking out loud here.

Personally I think it was because they have changed their policies.

I've never been on there but from what I heard a lot of people left because they had reduced the percentage. Don't know what the percentage is but a lot of them left and went to Zazzle.

And how about partners sites? Images are deleted from iS, but still visible and ready to buy with Partners... How long did it take in your cases to delete them from others?

I brought that up with them the second time around to make sure I got that money as well as had them removed from the pp site. They said it would take 30 days to get them off there. I honestly can't remember if they waited until they were removed from the pp site before they paid the final payment. Like I said the last contact with them was close to a year ago. I know I did get it, but just make sure you double check with some thing like tineye or some other kind of search on some of your pics that are on another stock site to be sure they are off there. Pretty sad when you have to do their job for them

It's been a long time ago when I requested they close my account. I got what was owed to me at that time. I could no longer sign on either once I requested they close it. I had no question as to why I should be concerned.

Well about a year later I did a tineye search on one of my images and low and behold it was still on iStock along with all my images that were suppose to have been deleted and they were still all for sell. They changed my name from donding to dondingdelete and had continued to sell my photos. I had over $100.00 in my account. Once I knew the name on the new account I was able to sign on with my password. I did finally get them deleted....at least I think...haven't checked lately. That's been almost a year ago the second time around so a total of two years since the original request. I did manage to get my money.

Just a word of warning folks. If you ask your account to be deleted....tin eye some of those images to make sure they are no longer on there making them money. If I had never run that tineye search I would never have known they were still selling my photos without my permission and they owed me money.

I could care less what Yuri does. He is just busy promoting his own business.

What keeps nagging at me is this mobile phone thing. So if someone requests a shot and all the members upload what they think the buyer wants and end up with 30 thou pictures, like Yuri described, why would that work? A buyer would have to dig through 30 thou pics to find what he wants. That would take a lot of time. Probably 3/4 are crap shots that couldn't even be used taken by someone who doesn't even know how to photograph. If you as a contributor didn't upload soon enough, then your picture would be buried in the heap. No way a buyer would dig through 30 thou photos looking for the right one. Yes it would be profitable to the site owner, but I don't see how to the contributor who gets buried in the heap, even if he had the best shot. Am I understanding this right? Seriously explain to me how this would work?

As for iStock/Getty, I think the reason most people are angry is because of the praise Yuri gives them after the treatment we all got from them. Maybe he didn't experience it because of who he is. I personally feel that is the reason. Anyone that enters a business deal will not bad mouth their business partner, especially if they are making money. Its the big money people who get invited to the bank's Christmas party and gets the free ham at Christmas, not the little guy. Who knows Yuri may be making more per sale than any one of us by iStock/Getty, just to keep him on board.

holy cow, they changed it all, I won't lose a second trying to figure it out, not a big fan of changes, sales went down massively this month too, whatever, have Wimbledon to watch

My sales have been going down ever since they tried to cram the 15% down our throat. I'm only making half of what I did before. I got a gut feeling this is going to kill sales especially if you make sales through your store rather than search feature. I think the layout they had for the main Zazzle homepage looked much better before. I haven't been in the forum yet, but I'm sure the topic is probably already several pages! I'm afraid to give any feedback on there for fear of being banned again.

As far as creating products on Zazzle, I have only used quick create a couple of times and I never liked it. The products always look terrible after they do it and I always have to go back and redo them. I do like TonyRay..I use already uploaded templates and customize to create another one. It's much faster and easier than doing each one separately. Just do a few tweaks on the Title, Description and Keywords and your done.

I have not receive any announcement from their side, thanks for posting.

If there was a change in volume bonus, I wished it was putting all the currencies together. It would make sense since there aren't really separate sites for each of them. I would understand if they had different offices with separate account management. Oh well, it doesn't have any importance anymore.

I didn't get one either. It was like a bombshell. The volume bonus is gone as of July. The 5% default royalty is kicking in on June 17. It just sounds fishy to me. I've tried so many different referral links and not with much success. It really doesn't do much good when most of the sites strip the codes. I'm not going to hold my breath where this is concerned because I got a feeling it's going to blow up in their face. Hopefully I'm wrong.

Feildsphotos thanks for posting this. I don't have the e-mail option turned on so I wouldn't have known what was going on. I don't understand why they don't automatically send e-mails out that are as important as major changes. It upsets me because I make extra money off that volume bonus. I guess another site on its way into the greed and feed world.
 

And not for the better.   They are removing the volume bonus program for sellers and moving it to affiliates only.   Also, they are now encouraging folks to lower their royalty rates to the new lower limit of 5%. 
 
http://forum.zazzle.com/news/important_news

The news not mentioned in this announcement but was announced in the Town Hall forum "meeting" was that any royalties set at 15% or greater will now be subject to their 5% transaction fee.   The transaction fee comes out of the royalty you made.   So if your royalty rate is set at 15% and you sell a shirt for $20, your royalty would have been $3.00.  They will then take the 5% transaction fee out of that and you will get $2.85 instead.  (assuming my math is correct). 
   
Town Hall discussion:  http://forum.zazzle.com/townhall/town_hall_iv

The volume bonus thing won't affect me too much, since my port is still small there, but it was a nice incentive for growing my port there that is now gone.   Some more established sellers were making 30% of their income from the volume bonus amounts, so it will be a kick in the teeth for them. 

The new lower limit on royalties just doesn't bode well for the future IMHO.   I fully expect we will see the new royalty "cutoff" for promoting etc lower to 10% in the near future (down from the 15% it is now). 

We've committed to some volunteer work in the Rio Grande Valley -- Sept, Oct, Nov.  A great birding and wildlife area.  There's even an ocelot terrorizing the birds in that area.  My goal is to capture him with this:

http://www.adorama.com/CA40056AFU.html

Of course, we'll be taking it down for a trial run ... as soon as it arrives.   

Don't get to hot while you are there. Temps can still be high in Texas even in November.

Google top rated monitors for 2013.

Here's a couple of results. The higher resolution ones are better.

http://lifehacker.com/5966781/five-best-computer-monitors
http://reviews.cnet.com/best-lcd-monitors/

Check more than one site and see if there are the same reviews on the same ones and that will give you a pretty good indication which ones are on top. Research customer comments as well. That's how I bought mine three years ago.