As a newbie to Fotolia, earlier this year, I was very encouraged when my earning doubled with one single dl . It was on my fourth month and with a really tiny portfolio . I got an Ext Lic. and my commission was something like 6 dollars.
For a small portfolio and a new contributor it was nice to see my commission total
double in one day.
My question to all you here is twofold:
i) in your longer time with Fotolia and others, do you sell many Ext Lic?
ii) do you think certain images have more potential of getting Ext Lic
than others?
iii) if you say yes to (ii), would you say it pays off if we just try to make images that
do better in getting Ext Lic.

(iii) might sound naive to some of you experts, so bear with me. I am here to look for ideas to improve my portfolio which I think personally has improved a lot for someone who is only a bit over one year old in micro stock. and just half year with fotolia.

Cheers in advance for your input.

thx Pixart, thx disorderly, for the clarification. Now I get it: Getty's out to appease the exclusives. Well, in a way I guess that's fair , if you're exclusive.
I am looking out for the possibility to be exclusive one day in the future , choosing from the sites I am with,(no, not with IS though...)
but if I became exclusive for Fotolia, or another Big6, or even a mid stock,etc...
I too would expect some kind of special treatment. So I guess I can't knock Getty for doing more for their exclusives. Cheers once more for taking the time to answer me.
matt

wow 15.50. Congrats.
What is Vetta? I am not with IS so I don't follow them much. I only know from the news here that Getty has killed hopes of making anything more than 30 cents ,etc with the postings of subs with IS and StockXpert. This does not sound like Getty , to shaft others with minimal commissions and than give 15.50 phenomenal commission at the same time. Can you please explain what really is going on in Getty's head?

Cheers,
matt

I started as a newbie one and half years ago and went nuts with 17 sites including Photo Shelter and Alamy. But now I am down to like 5. By the end of 2009,
I like to end up with 3 , if not 1.
It's a bit crazy thinking that more is better. At first as a newbie it's nice to get accepted everywhere but later you realised only a handful actually sell for you.
Nowadays, I am almost convince that finding one site or 3 at the most , sites that will work hard to sell your images , is better than 17 . Less trouble more effective.
That's for me, though. Others I am sure will disagree.
As I 've been saying lately, I am not interested in 100% approval, just more sales.

Well, like everyone else, I have happy moments and unhappy moments. But I'd like to know if you are happy or unhappy in general.

Personally I am not very happy these days. I am frustrated that I have not reached my goal in sales, the agencies sometimes reject good images for "not for stock" and change the terms whenever they see fit. I also feel unhappy when I see photographers attack each other when there are differences in opinions in the forums, even though I have never been personally attacked.

When I do get a rejection I make note of what they don't like, and then I remove those "types" of images from their future upload list. I know it has nothing to do with them not liking my work, just not needing them .
Would I prefer 100% acceptance and 0 sales?  I don't care how many images they reject, I only care how many images they sell for me.

I hope that makes sense .It does, at least to me.

generally, it's best not to do any sharpening, NR,etc.. in camera. reason because the processing is irreversible. i always prefer to shoot RAW and use photoshop to do all adjusting. also shoot at the highest resolution. and if it needs sharpening, do it in RAW. many times you don't even need sharpening, just downsizing alone can produce good results without any further sharpening.
ideally you should shoot at the sharpest aperture. you can find this in lense reviews , google it . many reviews will tell you which aperture perform the best .
then instead of doing general sharpening on one image, i prefer to use layers so the sharpening is specific in a certain area . layers are the best way to go, as you can use this to correct specific problems, one at the time. all without ruining the entire image.
hope this helps.

I haven't had a sale at DT in almost two weeks (granted I have a tiny port.) but I'm already at BME (almost twice as much as second highest) at SS and I haven't uploaded a thing to them in almost a month.  Seems kind of backwards to me.

No, based on the info here, it's obvious that new contributors and old images of established contributors get the downloads. I was thinking of not uploading anymore as my recent images have no views, but I am getting downloads. albeit mostly subs on older images and repeat sales.
This, I shouldn't complain as a dl is still a dl regardlessly.
Instead of not uploading, I am just uploading them to the edit box, save it till maybe later to finalize and submit. Maybe by summer's end when sales slowdown ends, I will then put all these abeyance images into my portfolio. So, it's not a protest against Dreamstime, but more so, adapting my submission schedule to fit to the way it works.

Race, it's true we are all growing old.
Some archive do last, but you have to literally not touch it since taking the shot or processing it. I was surprised to find my 4by5 slides, my 21/4 negatives and even many Kodachrome in good shape. Except that all these were in a kodak film box from day one donkey years ago which I kept as a souvenir . All were shot for my assignments with NYI . Even have some portraits of Sacha Trudeau , our charismatic PM Trudeau's son, as a little boy playing in the trees at Gatineau Park. Hell, I didn't even know he was Sacha and his other brothers with their nurse and bodyguard. SHe didn't look like Margaret, so I never thought about those pictures of the kids until many years later , someone told me they frequent there .
Still , my point to all this rambling of the past is this. We will all lose our nostalgic images if we do not literally treasure it. I didn't shoot E6 as they told me they were not as permanent as K25, K64. Probably due to our own home processing vs Kodak's lab formula for Kodachrome.
But some images do last forever. Only you have to be Ansel Adams, Cecil Beaton, Karsh, W Eugene Smith, Henri Cartier Bresson. You don't even have to worry about keeping them for yourself, a curator will do it for you.
The moral of the story being ... If you want your images to last forever,
GET GOOD, GET GREAT, GET FAMOUS.

Unfortunately for us, it's a bit late. Someone should have told me that when I was I a beginning with my box camera and my home made pin hole experimental camera which we constructed during the first intro lesson on photography, lol.

Still, the hours of great memory and fun photography gave us can still live on . Now if only we stop worrying over micro stock  and just shoot for ourselves all over again.
This much, the demise of Kodachrome is teaching me.

P.S.
I still have the little best wishes written for me by Mr Yousuf Karsh which he gave me from a card off his table, when I met him in his Chateau Laurier studio to show him my portfolio after graduating from NYI to move to Ottawa to freelance.
This sits also in another Kodak paper box. A treasure... I want my eulogy to be:
"he met Karsh and kept his card till the last breath " , lol.

wow, awesome sgcallaway..
I am new to Fotolia (joined Nov 2008) they are now my most active site with sales and dl  even though I have much much older accounts with the other Big#
I didn't know there is such a thing as Myfotolia. It's very helpful of you.

Does anyone know how long the queue wait is now?
Thanks.

Penelope, I started submitting my first batch  the same day I logged in with my PW to transfer my SV port,  18 June. This morning I had the first batch approved. It's not bad, considering that I did not submit all of the 10 images that day, and taking off the weekend.

i had my 10 firs approved in a couple of days, and the next day i uploaded 100 more and all are aproved now, don�t keep the count of days but it was less than a week.
What i really like is that when an image doesn�t meet their keyword criteria, the image got back to the workarea with a note on the problem and you can just delete the irrelevant words and send again to review, How sweet is that?

Yes, that alone deserves a mention for sure. It's clean and simple process and works for the contributors' convenience, instead of having to resubmit and all that hassle. Veer's upload process is certainly exemplary and some of the Big 6+3 should take note of this.
I am a late comer, as I waited till 10th to get in to transfer my SV port, then submitted my first 20 odd new images. This morning I had my first 10 reviewed , with 1 reject and 2 soft rejects.
It took me a couple of minutes to delete the irrelevant keywords and resubmit. The reject was also nice and neat, (no vague condescending nor those ubiquitous canned irritants eg. this is a snapshot; too simplistic; LCP, one of the following,etc.
Phew~!  a breath of fresh air.  Veer Marketplace, you rock!

Now we wait for some encouraging news of downloads 

stockastic, no, I don't mean DT disable the images. I mean myself, disable my own new images that have no views for so long