Exactly, it's the AD Agency to blame here.

And in any case the girl could sue anyways if she wanted, there are so many legal loopholes in these cases as people watching the advertisement could think she is HIV+ ... and this i don't think is fully covered on the MR she signed, if she ever signed a MR at all.

They usually have opinions about this sort of thing, though.

or maybe Alamy banned any discussion on this subject as usual ?

It's weird that this has hardly been commented on over there.
You'd think it would deserve a thread of its own.

their forum is dead, it's the usual dozen guys still writing there.

I don't want to go to the cloud either and I'll stick with CS6 as long as I can but I know I'll eventually be forced to do something different.  Adobe refuses to support new cameras in older versions of their products.  I was perfectly happy with CS4 but I was forced to go to CS6 when I got my 5D Mark III.  Eventually I'll upgrade to a new camera body and I'll be forced to make a move again.  I hate that.

Actually you just need to upgrade Camera Raw, but some versions of camera raw only work with the latest PS.

I think we're witnessing a new era of computing : in many fields the software has reached full maturity, all the important features have been developed and there's little left to add to convince buyers to buy upgrades.

This is true for PS but also many others.

So now they're switching to pay-per-use but this makes no sense for users as they can see by themselves they will just receive some bug fixes and very small new features at best.

From a technology perspective, these products are complete, their mission is finished, they're like an old successful car that is still sold over and over and get some minor makeover from time to time but if we talk about productivity where's the big difference between CS4/5 and CS7 ?

Users will be forced to upgrade as CS4 can't run on Win8 but now they've a good reason to look for alternatives.
There are even free Raw converters that do a good job, see RawTherapee and similar lightroom "clones" that look promising.

Nothig will replace PS but i can certainly do 80-90% of my workflow with a free clone of LR if i want, i never spent time on the cheaper alternatives before but now i could and i can see RawTherapee being more advanced than LR in many ways.

Or i could stick to pirated warez like anyone else here in Asia, up to you Adobe !

Not quite, but presumably they are those (at whatever level) for whom iS is still doing well.
They'd probably be equally astonished at what is said here.

in that case they're not doing their homework and they deserve to be scre-wed by istock.

What astonishes me is the overwhelming positive reaction in the forum over there (between tasks at work at the moment and so bored I was reading them).  The structure is collapsing and the solution appears to be to hang a new sign on the door?

maybe the only ones still writing in that forum are fresh newbies.

That stuff drives me crazy. I have to argue with clients to get decent money for a logo, meanwhile these companies happily spend 6 or 7 figures on logos that look like they took 20 minutes to come up with. The new Colorado logo comes to mind, too.

i could be wrong but they just used the Sans-Serif version of the Getty Company Font !

p.s.
it's not how long it takes to draw or invent a logo, it's the utter importance that a logo has for a company that matters.

there's whole science behind logos especially for IT companies, look at the logos of Lenovo, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, they all give a straight clear message, they're clear, simple, professional, and much more.

now look at Google instead, what the F ?? or the new Yahoo logo, even worse.

But Getty aren't 'doing fine' are they? Their revenues appear to have been roughly static since 2007 as you can read here;

Back in 2007 Istock were still a tiny part of the business but over the last 5-6 years they probably grew to become 30-40% of total revenues. It's pretty obvious from the recent drastic actions that Istock's revenues are imploding and it's not easy to see if and when they will be able to improve the situation. If revenue continues to fall then servicing the mountain of debt, bestowed by H&F as a parting gift to Getty, may become increasingly difficult.

Personally I think we are witnessing a massive upheaval, of truly geological proportions, within our industry. It won't happen overnight but the process is most definitely underway.

Getty owns the stock industry, if the slice of the pie where they can't compete anymore with SS is losing money they can pretty much dump it and sell out .. no problem ... they still make money with news, editorial, sport, reportage, etc

Do you see any newspaper sending his own in-house photographer in the middle of the action ? i don't see many ... most of them stick to wire agencies and wire agencies use freelancers in most of the cases too and they're the one doing the dirty job actually.

So, Getty losing up to 40% of their earnings because of istock and falling sales in creative RF/RM ? no big deal first of all because they're no more a public company, secondly because these are market-wide events affecting the entire industry and there's nothing Getty or their competitors can do to reverse the trend overnight.

If buyers unanimously cut their budgets agency can either slash their prices to accomodate buyers' needs or accept losing a big slice of their pie, in both case their market value will drop, same sh-it happens to journalists by the way, many newspapers have been shut down and jobs has been lost ... blame whoever or whatever you want but there's no going back, the whole media industry is under fire since a long time.

option 1 : Alamy is desperate and as a last chance is now begging for money, maybe they're already planning to sell out to Getty or whatever so they need to show potential buyers a sudden jump in sales.

option 2 : Alamy's buyers are cutting budgets to the bone and clearly told them they either slash prices or they will move to microstock.




in any case, it's BAD news for photographers !

the logic would be that the minimum possible price should be big enough to compensate for the production costs.
what we're seeing now instead is the minimum payout has been thrown out of the window even for RM so basically the whole model is crushing into itself as with RM you've almost no chance of selling the same image twice.

in a nutshell, it will be soon impossible to make a living out of RM alone unless the cost and time of editing/keywording is done by the agency and this is never gonna happen with Alamy.

sure, there will be maybe a bit more sales as the product is cheaper but overall photographers will earn less, exactly like on micros but without the benefits of micros.

i still don't understand why SS is selling editorial, it has nothing to do with its core business model and i'm sure the sales are sluggish to say the least.

the requirements are also ridicolous, proofs of accreditation ? gimme a break, no other agency does that.

if i had some fresh news editorial to upload i would throw it at Demotix, they give you FTP and other upload tools and no BS asked.

their TOS is crap, anything they say must be tried in court, and this will be hit or miss, see the recent legal battles between apple vs samsung and oracle vs google about stolen and unlicenced source codes.

as for their right to resell your images, i would like somebody show me just one famous photo that has been resold by a social network earning them a considerable amount of money.

all i'm seeing is newspapers stealing images from FB and other socials everyday but without paying a dime and without putting a credit or a link too.