Edited to add, just checked back OMG that was 12 days ago, and no updates since then, shame on you SS!

I raised my payout level on SS to 2000$ so I have some time to do all the paperwork. The withdrawal is only on payout. All topics about the IRS apparently have been banned on the SS forum. It's all about "they stole my pictures" and "show me your first/last download" again.  

And you know what is amazing? The image is still at the site PDN shows.  I have just done the search for "happy family" images in Google Images, and, if I wanted, I could have saved the 8MPix image that is still on Danielle Smith's site.  I could not find the image by navigating on her site - everywhere a login/password is required.  However, the image is reachable through the results page of Google Images, and in theory the person who sees it can not be considered a thief.

If the profile on the social network site is private, no way the Google bots can address the full-size picture. It's gone now but you can fine some other "happy families" unwatermarked on Google images, and as Tineye shows, it's a stock image.

My image is at 1:07, three kittens sleeping.

Ah, mine is just behind yours at 1.10 : the girl sleeping in the sun at Qatar airport.

Stefan is also very frequent name in Balkan peninsula

Stefanos is actually an old Greek name, meaning the coroneted, he who bears a crown.  
Swedish, well... they're just Vikings.

I just got accepted by Veer... great news!

And does it sell?

Oh well Thailand is close. But I don't like to be stuck at the airport.  

I can confirm that after the recent 'change', new images on SS go nowhere. The trend on all the micros is to stop boosting new images in favor of 'popularity' ranking of old images.  I made many more sales just 2 months ago, with fewer  photos, and on SS most of them were for new images.
If you think about this for 5 seconds you realize that images submitted today have no way to gain the popularity they'd need to become successful 'old' images.

Well, the only way to get sales on "new" images is let them grow old, so upload is the only option. If you don't upload now, they will grow old later. At Kingkyle: the change happened silently somewhere around the end of May when the SS forum was in turmoil about the IRS issue, so it almost went unnoticed.
For sales, DT and SS were a bit complimentary: DT for the long run, SS for the new images. It gave a nice bipolar earnings curve. Again, the long-term contributors will benefit and the new uploads/uploaders will suffer.

Both on DT and on SS, the buyer can rank to relevance and newness. If a simple change in the default algorithm (that chan be undone by one simple click) has so much repercussions on sales, one might wonder how (un)educated buyers really are. Sjlocke was right, there is room for blogs oriented towards buyers.

I'm just playing devil's advocate here. But I do think there's an inevitablity about 'free' stock images.

You are certainly right about the superiority of the search technology of Google into large databases. We all witnessed how major stock sites struggle with their search engine and with ways to evaluate relevance. One of the problems is that there is only a limited set of keywords to describe a virtually infinite collection of images, especially if all keywords have the same weight.

Let's assume for a moment that Google only addressed images from major stock sites, then the quality issues would be solved. If the search results were more relevant than those of the sites themselves, then there could be major changes for some contributors that are favored one way or another in a particular search engine. Plus that the price competition would become very transparant.

So basically you are right and it's in the best interest of contributors to stay out from nanostock for those images that are also on midstock. I don't assume that Google would sell those images themselves. They would only mediate the search.

I am livid about 6 cents and will do all I can to get away from pixmac.

You will have to wait a year and send them a registered snail mail for that. I reviewed the site and its terms when it started and I gently put it down. Their link density is generated by the typical E-European link circles. They smelt slightly fishy with their sweepstakes and later with their association with Heroturko. Everybody seemed to be blinded by those 100$. I hate to say "I told you so", but I told you so. 

Looked at the 123RF landing page? "Images as low as 0.19$".
Fotolia : images from 14 cents.
Dreamstime: high-resolution stock images can reach as low as $0.20 each.

They are all playing the price competition game.

Go ahead with that! It would be a great improvement, because it would "help" many contributors to fight the temptaion of putting their files in cheapo sites as well, knowing that doing that the would probably loss better sales at decent sites.

That would be a deadly application for the all you can eat for 0.01$ sites and I wondered how long it would take before somebody had that idea. Lookstat used the same technology for matching images on different sites and Tineye had it already for a while. Everybody then will probably end up with photos.com. Only exclusives are "safe".

It's just a matter of time till Google gets hold of the technology and makes it its base for Google images.

Waterstamp is awesome...

DOF fantastic and isolation perfect. 

Brian, I believe infraview is a very common keywording tool, can whatever bug in reading IPTC data be fixed to allow upload of files edited with infraview ?

Thanks both of you for noticing this. You saved me some time. Luckyoliver and another beginning site had the same problem in the beginning and it took me hours to help them out on that. Adobe and Irfanview use a slightly different scheme to encode metadata. Adobe is less standard. All vested sites can handle both formats flawlessly except for Bigstockphoto that sometimes fools up the Title field.

I'll wait to submit to Veer till the site corrected most of its bugs. You're all doing a great job finding those. 

I'll create an application for image buyers.  Give it an image (it can be small)  and the keywords you used to find it, and it will search all the microstock sites for the same image, finding the lowest price.

Hey, you stole my secret idea!

I would suggest that you guys voice your opinions at FP forum.

I lost my password again so I won't bother to write there. Why do they need to have a different pwd for the site and the forum? You and Milinz are doing a great job filling up the FP forum as I saw so I just limit myself to make photos and take your advice when the dust is settled there

Sure Istock is bad and FP is great, but I can only observe that Istock made me twice as much money since April as FP ever did in 2 years and with only 1/4 of my port. I'm just following the money