Thanks, does anyone know the specifics, especially for iStock?

Hi,
I have some 3d renders that have money in them. The money images used to map the dollars is a scan and I removed some of the serial info, however it was rejected by iStock for possible copyright infringement. The money is apart of the image, but not the main focus. What else do I have to remove/change to get this accepted?

Depends on your card, you can add you GPU manually, I remember I had to do this to take advantage of the Cuda cores and GPU rendering...I had to modify a .txt document in the program folder

Quote from: Spray and Pray on November 19, 2013, 09:53

"do not waste your time on Istock...."


Yeah, right! After the PP announcements last month everyone and their brother are uploading images like a mad dog!  A lot of folks, to include myself, had BME on iStock!

Depends what a BME really is.  Going from $10 to $12 extra or something, isn't that impressive.

It's all relative isn't it?

My PP earnings almost equal my iStock earnings for October...typically they are maybe 15-20% of my earnings. Is this in error? I hope not, but we've all seen iStock take money back before

I upload to iStock via FTP and have no real issues...the pain is I have to go back and add keywords...I wish they snagged the metadata on videos like they do with images.

One plus is that a lot of the outdated features such as ratings seems to be gone. One downside is trends is gone too. I was hoping they actually updated that, but instead they just removed it. The funny thing is the older my files get the better they seem to be doing...new files still seem to get buried fast. Although not the improvements I feel are most important, it has been good to see some change...for a while it was all talk.

Although I dislike their lack of communication and snail paced speed to fix anything they are still my top earner so i am with them for the ride...if they stop earning or do something that really compromises my work then I may jump ship...until then IS all the way ;P

So I recently added many images to the t
Op sites to the right. They are all doing well on every site but Pond5... Any ideas why? My pricing is in range of most images of the same caliber...but no sales and zero views on my top performers even...am I missing something?

Quote from: dingles on August 22, 2013, 12:25

It's such an easy correction and they can't even manage that. Do they only have one web guy dealing with all the issues?

My guess is they are going to revamp the site soon.  They may just replace the whole thing so why fix these little issues?  Just a guess.

Because it's live and misinformation

I am mostly a video guy, but I do have studio photography experience. Previously I did not put much effort into images as I couldn't produce the numbers to get a decent return. However I have been dabbling lately and decided to put images on iStock, Shutterstock, Pond5, Dreamstime, and Depositphotos. They all have approximately the same images, however there were a tiny portion rejected from Dreamstime...the rest seem to accept all of them. The images have now been up a couple of months...here are my thoughts on each agency from someone just starting. Surprising getting accepted went pretty smooth at all places as I have read some struggles on these forums, so that put a +1 on my ego .

iStock - Sales are okay through iStock main site, however most image sales are coming in from the Partner Program. Now the PP has only about 30% of my images ported from iStock, which is disappointing as it could be a bigger source of revenue...all in all sales are decent, but if they could address some issues they could be better.

Shutterstock - Sales a super strong...only thing is $0.25 an image is low, however if I was able to boost the amount of images, this could provide a nice return. All in all I have way more sales at Shutterstock than iStock(minus PP). This was the most surprising to me and sales started almost immediately, while a few years ago when I had content on SS I had no sales for a long time...So I hold SS in higher regard now.

Dreamstime - Sales are poor even thouigh views are decent, but I get a high return per images...more than 4X what I get per image from SS it seems. I find they reject a lot of images for odd reasons, but do allow appeals. Their review times are long, but they do provide a countdown which I have not seen elsewhere. I'm hoping things pick up, but overall SS and iStock are blowing them away as far as performance.

Depositphotos - Sales are poor, but views are up. The return is small, but a bit better than SS. Overall, I love the back-end uploading process...seems to be the best I have run into...just wished the site performed much better.

POND5 - No sales...no views...this is very disappointing as the returns at Pond5 are great, but sales are non existent and views just aren't showing. It is by far the one I want to perform most, but it doesn't seem like a pl;ace buyers go for images as videos is their strong suit. Oh well .

I have looked into Stocksy, but I don't feel my style of images match their motif. I did have content up on Fotolia a long time ago and it did okay, but I just wasn't happy with them overall and decided not to go back. I may try 123RF, but I'm not sure how far I want to branch out just yet.

Depends...if you can make the money back in a reasonable amount of time then you ate good...or are you okay with not making it all back but get an amount of joy owning better equipment.... Either way it's what works for you. I think you can easily get decent results from less expensive equipment.

Saying forever is just a poor move. It's first off a promise they can't keep unless they don't plan on being around long term.