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Messages - Desintegrator
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276
« on: November 30, 2016, 12:24 »
Probably a scam, but to what end on their end? Take down a pic? For what? Why?
n email I suspect it will be followed by a nasty attachment in a that might cause all sorts of problems.
Also getting the contributor's email address could be essential for a possible account breaking attempt. And they only have to make you reply them for that.
277
« on: November 30, 2016, 11:32 »
The only thing I see is that sales are skewed more to new images again, like it was 7-8 years ago. Until a month ago it was frightening that new images didn't sell at all. In this last week it turned around, the frightening thing is that sales would be terrible without my images uploaded since this summer.
278
« on: November 29, 2016, 20:53 »
Isn't it actually bad for us, contributors? Like a transition from credit sales to subscriptions? About two month ago I started to see a very promising growth, unprecedented in the recent years of microstock. With a large percentage of big credit sales. Then in the last few weeks it turned back significantly. Now I mostly get subscriptions with 0.33, 0.99 an 1.65 credit commissions. Good credit sales suddenly became rarer.
(but I shouldn't sound like seeing a disaster, I still get decent returns.. It's just that October was really magical at Fotolia and November is significantly less so, with considerably lower return per download)
279
« on: November 28, 2016, 05:42 »
DT does better for me than FT ... just saying
It's so interesting that people get this much difference in how sites are selling. I just did a summary of the last 12 months and FT earned exactly 7 times more than DT. Contributor since 2006 on both of them and submitting the same photos at the same time. Except that DT also gets editorial.
280
« on: November 27, 2016, 10:24 »
It took me about 7 years, shooting only parttime. I didnt burn out because i was tired of shooting stock, i burned out because i was tired of being taken advantage of by the stock agencies. It lasted 7 years because i started early in microstock history. Today, i am sure it would take less time, and not even sure i would bother. It costs money to buy equipment, props, hire models, pay for travel, etc. At anywhere from .33 per image down to .02 cents per image now at some places, it just isnt worth it.
The only exception to that is if you are shooting other things like weddings, or shooting macrostock, and you use micro as just one more marketing tool. In other words, if you are a fulltime photographer and support yourself with income from work besides micro, i cant imagine burnout.
If you are only shooting microstock, my guess would be a couple of years now. When you start spending money then realize it will take you years for ROI, well...
Same for me. I haven't shot any planned studio work in well over a year. A few video shots to test equipment, but other than that it's been shooting what I enjoy and just uploading that non-stocky stuff. I have zip motivation to produce good, usable content for micro stock. The agencies have become so greedy and gutter bent on subs that I, like many, have given up the chase. I will start shooting again after the first of the year but more to start building a site. I am also going to get more serious about video where the pay is better than stills.
Someone posted one key truth about the content of micros and that is the quality of the content will be, more or less, sustained by people in third world countries where $800 a month is a nice living. Such of their work is very well done, images and illustrations. They will own micros and micros will keep cutting to tenth of pennies and they will be fine with it. I'm not. My cost of living is greater than theirs and that forces me into looking for new revenue streams that pay more. It's happening now. No longer a guess as to where micros are going.
Actually for $800 a month being OK earning you don't have to go to "third world countries". Even in the eastern parts of the EU there are countries with millions of people who would do almost anything for that kind of income.
281
« on: November 27, 2016, 09:26 »
Serious question:
Why do I get $4 sales on files that cost $5, $2.4 sales on files that cost $3, etc... And that's before you deduct your shady fees and taxes..
282
« on: November 13, 2016, 10:36 »
Do you have problems uploading to Pond5 too?
I got a message from StockSubmitter today telling that Pond5 is making its anti-bot system more complicated and Pond5 technicians are not answering to StockSubmitter reps.
Let's make inquires here together: https://help.pond5.com
Letter sent to them
283
« on: November 07, 2016, 07:22 »
I'm also experiencing wierd problems with Pond5 and 123RF
284
« on: November 05, 2016, 15:14 »
I won't sign a petition either that only demands to keep to current royalties. It should ask for at least 30%. Maybe in the case of istock I would think about signing it at 25%, but not sure. I know it's unrealistic to expect that from Getty, still I just can't sign my name under a petition that asks for 16-17% royalty instead of 15...
285
« on: November 02, 2016, 11:12 »
well I've seen his sales, and mine haven't earned him a whole lot of money,
but I was concerned for some of the other photographers, with images that I recognize as popular stock images,
to put in perspective; he's made about 1000 sales maybe more (just on easy alone),
I found my sales to be less than 5 of the total, so just a flash in the pan.. but there are some images that must have sold hundreds of times for him. Hopefully someone who has produced an image like that is able to launch their own offensive a little better than I can.
in any case, thanks Substancep,
Have you connected Etsy support?
286
« on: November 01, 2016, 07:12 »
Worse then last year, but 2015 was a surprisingly good year for me.
287
« on: November 01, 2016, 07:08 »
Hello my friends,
I have this issue and i dont know how to solve it.
The photos are here: https://500px.com/xenupy/galleries/karmann-ghia
I have a property release that i sign as a owner and a photographer (it is indeed my car) and my wife sign as witness...
So... why shutterstock is always denying my photos (the other agencies accept them).
They say when they reject Intellectual Property infriges on another party, artwork is visible or an object design is protected by copyright and the property release does not meet our requirements.
What is wrong?
Thank you all,
Great forum btw
You can upload these only as editorial. But the post processing of many of the photos are not really editorial style. They should look much ore natural. You can not upload photos with individual cars as the main subject for commercial use. I'm actually wondering how other agencies accepted them.
288
« on: October 26, 2016, 14:08 »
Update: I found out how to make it much faster:
if you go to My account > My Uploads and select the whole table which is displaying 1 to 20 of xxxx matches - you can paste it in some smart HTML-editor like Adobe Dreamweaver - it has that very nice function "Find and Replace">"Replace All". So I just made bulk replacement of
Nice!
However if you want a list of IDs for ALL files and not just 20 per page:
use DeepMeta
fetch statistics
in the "Files" tab, select everything and right click to copy
paste into a text file and save as .csv
open in Excel: IDs in first column, or full edit links in column AE
replace as per your post
Haha good idea! I was about to remove Deepmeta from my computer, but now i think it can have some more use 
289
« on: October 26, 2016, 09:13 »
Update: I found out how to make it much faster:
if you go to My account > My Uploads and select the whole table which is displaying 1 to 20 of xxxx matches - you can paste it in some smart HTML-editor like Adobe Dreamweaver - it has that very nice function "Find and Replace">"Replace All". So I just made bulk replacement of
https://secure.istockphoto.com/file_closeup_edit.php?id=
with this
http://www.istockphoto.com/file_status_change.php?id=
and I got ready-to-use HTML-file filled with files deactivation links. Then I just saved it and open it in my browser and clicked on all those links (it's easier to to that in new tabs in the same browser window): I can perform bulk images deactivation - 20 files in one window! 
I guess you don't even need a HTML editor, to replace texts in a file, a simple text editor can do that
290
« on: October 25, 2016, 12:16 »
Probably time to stop uploading there
291
« on: October 16, 2016, 12:31 »
These titles make Shutterstock look like a warez site.
292
« on: October 14, 2016, 04:47 »
Hi, I have my portfolio > www.milanstojanovic.com, and I got rejected as a contributor photographer few times.
What am I doing wrong, what kind of images I'm missing to provide?
Have you been contacted telling about the rejection? Because I've submitted application 2 times, and I've got not any word from them in several months
293
« on: October 13, 2016, 10:35 »
Far from being an "unnecessary complication" it is something that works heavily to Fotolia's advantage, as the credit purchase prices are calculated differently from the photographers' credit values so the actual percentage of the sale that the photographer receives is obscured (and almost certainly isn't what you think it is). There was a lot of discussion about this years ago when it was introduced - the thread is here somewhere but I can't remember the details.
What do you mean by "when it was introduced?". I signed up in 2006 and even then 1 credit wasn't equal to 1USD
295
« on: October 12, 2016, 07:45 »
I'm not from the UK, just the first Fotolia link i had came across many years ago happened to be en.fotolia.com. Soafter registering there, I'm stuck with receiving 0.75 pounds/credit. Truth to be told, most of the time it had been more than 1USD/credit.
But really, something needs to be done about this nonsense with currencies at Fotolia.
296
« on: October 10, 2016, 09:06 »
Contributor site is very very slow and in some moment unavailable
297
« on: October 03, 2016, 05:48 »
Let's assume that i'll upload 1 000 000 good shots today.......
My question is: How long does it take to make a decent income from 1 000 000 photos? How many months/years must pass with that million photos already accepted to start earn a living?
I find these types of questions so seriously annoying.. And this one is particularly nonsensical 
How many contributors do you think have EVER uploaded one million photos on one day? How many contributors do you think even have one million photos in their portfolios? Who do you think can truthfully answer this question?
And moreover - is anyone of us a fortuneteller? Do we see into future? The environment in microstock have changed tremendously in last couple of years, the number of images in the databases of agencies have gone up from a few million to more than 100 million, solely on Shutterstock... The conditions for growth are not the same anymore, they are quite different and changing as we speak. So any previous experience regarding number of images in port, increase of income etc... cannot be automatically applied on whatever will happen in future.
Are you just trolling? Unlike you, some people still take this business seriously.
What's more, "earning a living" means vastly different things around the Globe. For someone it $200 a month, for someone it's 5000.
298
« on: October 03, 2016, 05:46 »
You are wrong. Images peak not too long after upload and go down hill from there.
It was true about 8 years ago. Nowadays in many cases months pass before an image starts to sell, and with a selected few images sales increase even after years. Especially these days, when on Shutterstock only old, well established shots seem to sell over and over again
299
« on: October 02, 2016, 10:29 »
"Why do they put tax withholding on money that I don't even earn?"
Yeah, nobody's quite figured that out yet!
They calculate the full sales price (including their commission) as your income and consequently you get 28% withheld of the sales price - not only of your commission. After that, additionally, they take their "share" as commission from the sales price and you are left with the rest.
If you supply a Tax ID from "whereever", the states or international, you have a hight chance that due to the FATCA agreement the US will report later the TOTAL of Envatos income of a sale (including their "commission") as YOUR income to your local Tax office which will get you Audited or bring even more trouble.
I understand that some really make money their buuuuuuuut......seriously, everybody with some self respect left should stop submitting to "companies" like Envato or, better, delete their Port there.
Now I'm seriously thinking about this. Back in the past I used to a earn a solid $150/month there. I kept submitting and now I earn only a small fraction of that. And this commission system seems to be a joke.
300
« on: October 02, 2016, 08:30 »
Their image counters add EXACTLY 40 images per hour in EVERY category: photos, vectors, editorial and video.
THIS should go on their facebook with a short explanation
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