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Messages - stockastic
Pages: 1 2 [3] 4 5 6 7 8 ... 160
51
« on: April 14, 2021, 09:55 »
Recently there have been a bunch of threads on FAAs forum about bad or unresponsive customer service. There are various opinions on the integrity of the BBB, but it's a fact that FAA has an "F" rating while Etsy's is an "A".
FAA is basically a one man show, owned and operated by Sean Broihier, about whom little is known. He never communicates with users and apparently has no web presence. My impression is that FAA just doesn't have enough staff to deal with problems that are now coming up.
I sell on FAA but if a customer ever contacted me personally about a print, I wouldn't send them there.
52
« on: February 17, 2021, 16:41 »
Also agree you should just ignore it and move on. This kind of performative wokeness hurts no one as much as it hurts the people doing it. In fact it is often (but by no means always) a ploy by bad faith actors to make legitimate concerns seem frivolous.
My portfolio contains a large amount of diverse content and I can tell you that a sizeable percentage of buyers still use the term Afro American (about 20% of the people using black), so it is perfectly valid term for buyers with or without the hair style. Buyers should be using it in combination with natural and hairstyle and maybe some NOT clauses if they want to isolate just Afro hair (not sure if Shutterstock search uses boolean phrases, if not thats on them not you).
"Performative wokeness". Perfect. Do you have copyright on this, or can I start using it?
Fill your boots up. "tokenism" and "dumb-dumb left" are there for you too if you want to use them. This kind of nonsense is a distraction from actual necessary concrete or systemic change and makes movements easy to mock, straw man or co-opt by people who just learn all the correct vocabulary and do nothing concrete.
Exactly. This sort of play-acting just makes everything worse. I associate with people who really don't know the real, complicated history of the issue - or much history at all, really.
53
« on: February 17, 2021, 11:49 »
Also agree you should just ignore it and move on. This kind of performative wokeness hurts no one as much as it hurts the people doing it. In fact it is often (but by no means always) a ploy by bad faith actors to make legitimate concerns seem frivolous.
My portfolio contains a large amount of diverse content and I can tell you that a sizeable percentage of buyers still use the term Afro American (about 20% of the people using black), so it is perfectly valid term for buyers with or without the hair style. Buyers should be using it in combination with natural and hairstyle and maybe some NOT clauses if they want to isolate just Afro hair (not sure if Shutterstock search uses boolean phrases, if not thats on them not you).
"Performative wokeness". Perfect. Do you have copyright on this, or can I start using it?
54
« on: January 20, 2021, 11:34 »
The main trend is that companies like SS will continue grinding "creatives" into dust.
55
« on: January 13, 2021, 13:04 »
It looks like they have a working keyword search facility, and give you control over price. So they're at least worth of consideration.
There's a critical relationship between how much work it is to upload, versus the chances of actually selling anything, and the responsibilities they take on. Society6, for example, makes it incredibly tedious to submit images. But Fine Art America is a pretty smooth submission process.
Could some of you already using ArtPal comment on this? Do they read the IPTC keywords, for example? Do they handle refunds and returns?
56
« on: December 10, 2020, 10:40 »
Note that "worthwhile" means, literally, that something will repay the time spent on it.
57
« on: October 20, 2020, 20:48 »
After banging my head against this for an hour, and downloading all sorts of crap, I went back to PixiShot and figured out my problem - I think. It has a non-obivious option to "automatically save files" which is off by default. Long story short, in that state you will see all sorts of weird behavior as you edit IPTC because it isn't save right away and in fact often reverts to the original - silently. But enable that option and it seems to modify the file on disc right away.
I think I'm ok now.
58
« on: October 20, 2020, 19:50 »
GIMP! Now there's a name from the past. Being a Windows guy I've never used it. But I see they have a windows version. I know it's an image editor, but is it also a good browser and IPTC editor?
UPDATE: No, it's not. I just installed it, took a quick trip to hell, and uninstalled.
59
« on: October 20, 2020, 16:52 »
I know I tried Breezebrowser once. Maybe there was a reason I didn't like it, or else I just wouldn't pay $95 which IMHO is crazy. But I'll look again.
UPDATE: I downloaded the trial and now I remember the problem: no way to copy/paste IPTC from one photo to another. I think you can export it to a file, then import it, or something. Messy and slow.
60
« on: October 20, 2020, 15:06 »
Sounds like you've already decided to stay no matter what.
61
« on: October 20, 2020, 11:10 »
Old thread that I'd like to revive.
I'm still looking for a better tool for editing IPTC keywords, descriptions,titles etc.
PixiShot does the job, but it's dated and clunky. The main point of pain is the text editor, a pathetic little single-line window that shows about 8 words at a time and can't be enlarged. And not being able to select ascending/descending sort order is pretty bad.
It's deadware, hasn't been updated in years.
Does anyone know of something newer and better?
62
« on: September 27, 2020, 16:12 »
You want opinions on FAA, you've come to the right place, I have them.
Have you ever experimented with pricing - ie bring your margins low for a period to see if sales increase? I think if you have a sale it makes it a bit more likely for that file to appear higher in their own searches so getting some low margin sales might help when you put your prices up again
Steve
I probably don't sell enough to conduct a useful test. My markups are pretty low anyway. And for a big print or canvas, the shipping charges outweigh everything else. I'd say that FAA's internal search rankings are based almost completely on past sales. And although I do sell some, I haven't seen an upward trend. During the time I've been there, big content companies like Getty and Conde Nast have cut deals with FAA and come in with their 10s of thousands of images, and so we're now selling against them, in addition to the thousands of new wannabes like me who come in all the time.
63
« on: September 27, 2020, 14:25 »
I've been on FAA for about 8 years, and by some miracle I usually sell a few photos every month.I've been reading their user forum all that time, and I've seen the issues. You want opinions on FAA, you've come to the right place, I have them.
The FAA "Artist Web Site" sounds like a good deal, and it's better than nothing, but it has some serious shortcomings.
It's not really a web site, just a customized view of the FAA site restricted to your work. You can't use your own domain (although you can redirect it).
Customization is very limited; you can't actually get at the HTML/CSS or add any of your own.
The big issue in my mind is Google. FAA plays lots of games to funnel Google keyword searches to their main site, not to "your" site. I think it's very questionable whether an FAA 'Artist' web site gets indexed in any meaningful way, or has useful search ranking. You never build up your own 'domain authority', you're just adding to FAA's. And since you don't own the domain, you can't hook up Google Search Console and see what's really happening.
If you use Google's site performance tool, you'll see that an FAA 'artist' site ranks poorly for speed, due mainly to the overly large JPGs they're serving, which the browser has to resize (this is NOT the case on their main site). And it's also bad on mobile devices. Google is probably penalizing these sites because of this. While you can have keywords and a description, the image pages overall are cluttered and repetitious, likely to be rejected by Google's crawler.
Bottom line, one of these 'artist sites' can be useful IF you have your own ways of sending customers to it. But I don't think you can ever build up a Google ranking.
These are just my opinions and observations. If someone thinks they're getting good Google ranking for their work on an FAA 'artist' site, please jump in here.
64
« on: September 25, 2020, 09:22 »
One of the things that makes FAA convenient is that you get your personal pixels.ccom site which is basically FAA store clone which you can use as a store implemented in your personal website or by app on page, or via link to your pixels store where only your work is shown.
EXCEPT for the little fact that when someone does a search on 'your' pixel site, the results come from the entire FAA collection, so any users you may attract are soon lured away
No it doesn't. That happens only on your FAA profile page. On your personal pixels.com site only your work shows up and nothing else.
I was 100% sure in this but I just checked again. Only your work shows up and its a huge +
It's happened in the past. Then a bunch of users complained on the forum there, and eventually it was fixed. I think this happened more than once. I've been selling there for years, usually a few a month.
65
« on: September 12, 2020, 09:08 »
Nothing earth shattering about that piece. I think anyone who has been in the biz for a while knows the themes very well. The one thing he states is the "internet scams" and he is right. I still see all these ads to make a good income from photography. "We are better than Fine Art America" gallery sites, "we have an un-discovered photography niche", etc. They are really laughable and Jim is right in that the only ones who will make any money are those agencies who exploit photographers.
As someone who sells on Fine Art America, I know their deficiencies all too well and I'd be very happy to find another gallery site that's "better". Who's making that claim? I haven't seen the ads.
66
« on: September 11, 2020, 10:20 »
byron dont listen to rinder the old fool, he has no real interest in your portfolio all he wants to do is knock you down and trash all over you and he'lll come up with a 50 year old story how he's been around since the 1800s shooting with magnesium flashes etc and that he makes 100k for a single photo yet he is still here selling images for 10 cent on shutterstock. he still has over 7000 images there and adding which makes him a hypocrite as well.
no one is allowed a different opinion from the masses up here, if you have you'll get trashed, mocked, insulted and patronised, just see the comment from martha as an example and she is supposed to be a sweet old lady
And yet thats exactly what you do/are doing 
Best to lead with a stream of personal insults, ridicule and age-ism. Then, follow with your own victimization and a heroic appeal for freedom and tolerance. "Oh would some power the gift give us, To see ourselves as others see us" - Robert Burns
67
« on: August 09, 2020, 08:49 »
With regard to selling prints on Etsy, there are useful threads on the FAA forum. IMHO it's basically a huge PITA. You have to provide free shipping, handle complaints and returns, and keep detailed tax records.
FAA can be your drop-ship fulillment 'partner' but their shipping charges are wildly unpredictable and can be very high. So to offer free shipping, you have to make a guess about shipping, and could lose a lot of money on a large framed print.
If the print doesn't arrive when expected, or is of poor quality, it's all on you. You have to work through FAA's spotty and slow customer service.
68
« on: August 06, 2020, 12:59 »
Ok I got 14 images accepted, keyworded and captioned, after a gap of about 4 years. Every one of my brief well-written captions in the IPTC was cruelly chopped off at 150 characters and had to be fixed up. Took me half an hour to straighten them out.
And I swear this is the last time I submit to a microstock agency. No really.
69
« on: August 02, 2020, 17:39 »
I'm just another photographer who can't do much with COVID-19 still out there, and is sitting home trying to think of things to do. I just uploaded a dozen to Alamy. I'll probably get an incomprehensible quality rejection and then I can stop wasting time on this. 
70
« on: August 02, 2020, 16:00 »
So what about Supertags? Do they matter, or is this just more hoo-ha that was hot for a few months and then forgotten?
71
« on: August 02, 2020, 14:55 »
Since I haven't looked at Alamy in years I knew nothing about their current image manager. So I just watched their short video explaining it. I noticed that every image in the example account showed "poor discoverability" and the narrator never addressed that or said a word about what it meant.
There was a single vague statement about how Supertags are prioritized, or something like that.
I then found another video on YouTube about "how to increase your Alamy discoverablity" and it basically said you just stuff keywords until you get to 50, and showed an example of how doing this finally gave you that green Discoverability indication.
Seriously, this is what they want? Just more keyword spamming?
72
« on: July 31, 2020, 09:41 »
I'm already remembering why I gave up on Alamy years ago. I thought things might have been simplified by now.
73
« on: July 30, 2020, 15:09 »
Well I see one thing about Alamy hasn't changed: the big question is still, is it even worth the time spent grinding through their keywording process?
If they just took the first 10 keywords, by default, I'd be fine. But no.
74
« on: July 30, 2020, 12:40 »
I'll check this out myself of course, but what's a "supertag" and would I have to go back and punch them all in by hand?
75
« on: July 30, 2020, 09:29 »
I got out of microstock years ago - except for Alamy. Amazingly, I still get a sale now and then and it pays at least a few dollars, so I'm thinking about adding some new ones just for laughs.
I see most of my images have "poor discoverability" despite good descriptions and keywords.
It's been years since I looked at this, and I remember that tedious keywording interface. Can anyone cut to the chase and tell me the most likely cause of "poor discoverability" on Alamy as it is today? Or does it even matter?
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