The absolute definition of "paranoid" is: Trump. This dictator called the mobs of his party to come and storm the capitol, where five people lost their life. Therefore he is the killer of those killed while storming the capitol. I hope American Justice will do their duties and call this criminal mind before The Highest Court of America with charges of intentional murder. This insane paranoid must be brought to justice. He Must pay for his criminal acts. America Was a great country BEFORE his administration. He definitely managed to Make America Shorter... to the eyes of the World.-   

I do not rely on any agency any more. After many years of doing stock, I am really not motivated to produce fresh images for the stock photo agencies, particularly if I have to pay a model or travel for stock. Following the iStock and SS fiasco, Adobe walks the very same route in my opinion. I left iStock as soon as they started their filthy game. I have disabled my SS portfolio as I do not want my images be sold for 10 cents.  I still upload to Adobe, Alamy, DT, DP, 123RF and Pond5 (images). Adobe started out with very good sales. It was promising. Today my sales at Adobe are down to about 40% of last year, and keep dropping, although I keep uploading fresh images on a regular weekly basis. My Alamy sales are very small, and DT, DP, 123RF are mediocre - takes me over a year to make a payout (DT in particular), whlile at Pond5 I am convinced I am wasting my time. No image sales at all.
Must mention that Shutterstock was my best earner from day one. At this place I had many best sellers over the years. Those SS bestsellers had very good sales at Fotollia also. When AdobeStock  bought FT, those SS best sellers were given no chance at Adobe Stock. Additionally the majority of my new images have no sales at all here. This is why I can not trust Adobe Stock.

I personally do not depend on Stock photo sales to make living of it.  I have been doing stock for fun, but I do expect to have some income enough to cover the costs involved in the making of the images.

JUST A NOTE: No matter what happens to the Stock industry, I will continue making pictures, as Photography has always been part of my life.

"Josephine", "Pgkfleming

Do you have the guts to show your portfolio here in this Forum? Then I can tell you how much your art is worth of.

Many of us are at Levels 5 and 6, and many of us have seen our images travel around the world, and we are proud we have created such images. And the majority of us here respect our efforts in creating useful art, and will not accept to sell it for 10c.

Make a note of this: If you are real contributors, January 1, 2021, you - that is your portfolio - will be swimming at the bottom of the ocean. Your income too!!! You will need to swim in filthy waters struggling to come up to the surface....

But the way to the surface will be a dream that may never come true then...

Shutterstock has revealed itself. Fine.
Sorry Shutterstock, my pictures can not be valued at 0.10 cents. I value my efforts in creating stock images that sell. Therefore you are not qualified to have my High Quality work on your platform. Creative contributors with High Quality works will all leave you. Soon you will stay with the piles of crappy mediocre mobile photos of unskilled first timers amateurs and the millions of identical marijuana and other drugs shots. That is what you deserve. If you are asking if I can sell my photos at better prices. The answer is yes, and this is what I am doing by the way. So long Shutterstock. Your descent has just started.

Mr Boris Joke should look in his mirror and tell us what he sees. I am sure he will see an ugly bloody monster. The entire world suffers from coronavirus and people loose their life every day the hundreds or thousands. Yet he lives in his own world - something like a psychologically naive person. He is a cynical grotesque ignorant disgusting creature accompanied by a wild Herd of miserable irresponsible consultants and a swarm of "puppet politicians" who do not have a clue of what to do for their followers.
Coronavirus is not a "table game". From a humanitarian point of view it is mandatory that both the government and the citizens of the Country, must obey the INTERNATIONAL MEDICAL COMMUNITY HEALTH INSTRUCTIONS so we can all have a chance to hope for a better tomorrow.- 

My turn to suffer.
The following is actually addressed to Shutterstock hoping someone of their stuff is �fishing� on this forum.
Normally my acceptance rate is very good at all agencies I upload to. My Shutterstock acceptance rate is usually about 95%.

Last couple of weeks I go through an ordeal of insane rejections from Shutterstock for all kinds of nonexistent reasons: �focus: the main subject of this image is not in focus�, �noise/artifacts/film grain�, �composition�, �invalid model/property release�, titles/captions/keywords must be in English etc to mention a few.
On the other hand Shutterstock is trying to �motivate� me to produce more content by sending me the Shoot Lists, tries to tell me how important it is to hire and work with models, and emphasizes to have the property release � model release signed when applicable.

Shutterstock is contradicting itself. They tell me to hire and pay models, to pay rent for real estate location, pay assistants, and buy the props. That is � depending on the shoot � pay a large amount of money, spend endless hours to inspect all images one by one, make necessary adjustments, add titles, captions, keywords, double check model/property releases for errors, and finally upload the images.

And here comes the fun: When I submit finished work, the images go to a Highly Unqualified human or robot �reviewer� who has no idea of what he/she is viewing, and in no time he/she determines that their own model/property release is invalid, image composition is not good enough, focus should be elsewhere in the image, sees noise/artifacts/film grain, title/caption/keywords are unsuitable. And boom!!! Rejects 70-80% of my images, and throws all my Efforts and all the hot cash I paid for Expenses directly to the trash can.

Recently I have had images � with or without models � new and from photoshoots series they have already accepted, now being rejected for one or more of the reasons above. This drives me crazy as I upload and submit only the best images.
To make a long story short, if any Shutterstock �reviewer� or other responsible personnel of the agency is listening here, this is what I would like to say:

1.   It was about eight years ago when I started as a contributor at Shutterstock. At that time I had to submit 10 images for evaluation before I was accepted. All ten images passed the very first time. Same happened with other agencies I contribute to.

2.   None of the rejection reasons listed above is applicable to the images I produce. It is bad I cannot fight back as I know I will not be heard. As a rule I produce images specifically for Stock, they are technically within the agency guidelines, and I use high end full frame cameras/lenses.

3.   Massive unjustified rejections of technically and commercially good images Do Not Motivate me to Produce for Shutterstock.

4.   I suggest Shutterstock itself should be brave enough to have a look into the millions of underexposed/overexposed, blurred, poorly composed, aesthetically unacceptable, and similar images in their collections, and Delete Them. They should also Delete their current �Reviewers� whatever they are.

I personally will not any more pay money for models and real property rental to make images and submit them to Shutterstock for rejection. Neither will I go into the trouble of resubmitting rejected photos. Hope Shutterstock Wakes Up and starts Listening to their Contributors.

Very fast here today. All pages load instantly.

Quote from: DigitalPro on November 16, 2019, 15:26

Quote from: Uncle Pete on November 16, 2019, 10:18

Quote from: DigitalPro on November 16, 2019, 10:12

Jonbull Prices you mention sound reasonable. I will try to contact some models for a couple of concepts I have in mind. Belgrade is not far from where I currently live - about one and a half hour flight. If financial terms end up positive, I can either fly to Belgrade or bring models to my location offering them an 8 day free vacation in an sea side airbnb villa with modern facilities including a pool, in exchange of their time - 5-6 hours photoshoot a day. TFV (time for vacation - flights included).  Will calculate costs and see if I should proceed or not.

Sorry to clip out some of the irrelevant parts. Maybe you should also calculate the earnings from those photos, not just the expenses? If you can make back your investment, time, money, everything in two years, that's not a bad plan. (except you already have the equipment and software, so you don't need to include that in a single project prediction?)

What's your return for 8 days and 40 to 48 hours of shooting. You should count your personal time editing and uploading as an expense.

How much profit do you expect?

Hello Pete,
You are absolutely right. It is mandatory all aspects of such a project must be taken in consideration to avoid unpleasant financial end results; however I cannot really predict the sales potential each image has. But I can say I am often surprised with repeating good sales coming from some of my older or/and newer images I thought did not have that much sales potential.
Of course I have the equipment and software. I do the editing, keywording etc by myself, and upload in small batches.

In regard to the prospective projects with the Serbian models, I find the idea of flying them over to my location best, as I have the experience of a photoshoot I did four years ago using the same approach. The models for that photoshoot were from Romania � young couple (male-female), no professional models. Six days creating stock photos in various concepts. Only difference: No villa. Offered them full board accommodation in a beach hotel plus flights. Photoshoot took place on the beach, mountains, parks, sports grounds and in the city. Everything worked fine. They were happy and I was content with the results and the financial outcome of this job. Many of those images did not sell at all. Some had random sales and faded away, but there are a small number of those images that sell nearly every single day since they were uploaded. Those few images are the ones that have returned the cost of the photoshoot several times back to me and still working with very good results. To be honest when I started that project I was not sure I would make my money back.
So I am kind of optimistic for this new photoshoot possibility. But that does not mean that I will make my money back in this case. Will see.

Sounds good if you can do that. I only said two years because that's a usual number to amortize an investment. I understand the expenses up front could be less by working you plan, which potentially means you can make your investment back sooner.

By the way the verified expert part was a joke but some people can't see past their anger, hostility and closed minds.

...beautiful day today and I am out shooting ...stock photos! 

Quote from: DigitalPro on November 15, 2019, 16:53

Quote from: jonbull on November 03, 2019, 12:11

Quote from: nd3000 on November 03, 2019, 02:46

Quote from: jonbull on November 02, 2019, 12:27

Quote from: Uncle Pete on November 02, 2019, 10:16

Quote from: jonbull on November 01, 2019, 12:52

the list is pretty old, in 2 years everything has changed...actually since 2017 ss open the gate an flooding of images has began...f

https://www.fotolia.com/p/206713618


this is house poe production born after 2017, in less than 2 years and a bunch of months they added half million images, there are much more from serbia and russia....the scheme is simple ,saturated all market, take idea and copycat them using many photographer paid penny,m and good model paid 10 dollar hours maximum. light field has a fully functional studio with lot of room, you can rent for 10 dollar hour if you go kiev to produce.

i have seen many house of production lately are copycatting especially the style and idea of jacob lund.

Show me your data collection for 2019? You know, locations, number of artists, image totals for top 20 maybe?

Thanks for the filler on Andorra I never would have known. Here's some things I found which I'd say I still don't know much about Andorra. Andorra, according to the World Bank, is among top 15 countries with the highest GDP per capita. ... According to International living index, Andorra is a 12-th position in the world in terms of level and quality of life. Andorra is often considered as one of the safest countries in the world, and Andorra La Vella one of the safest European cities. The most used language is English, 38.8% of the Andorran population speak Catalan. To date, there are 516 Russians in Andorra. The immigration policy of the Principality is under control, and the number of immigrants is strictly quoted according to demands of the economy.

The link for "house poe production born after 2017" whatever that means, doesn't show anything. Got a link that works? 

Reminder, true the location could be a lie and many accounts list no location. We don't know. This is simple the best information to indicate who has the largest accounts and where they are from. I don't know if SS actually checks the listed location. What I mean is, this is the best data available, if someone has better, please show us.

The data used for artists location was the 18,000 accounts that had over 1,000 images on SS at the time. Of course that could have changed, but the selection was designed to represent active contributors, not 300,000 accounts registered. (as an example, the number is now over 500,000)

But the question remains, show me your data, numbers and proof?

well don't have data but is pretty easy to see the influence of russia ukraine and serbia in  the database.. zillions of file...just search any lifestyle idea you will see the predominance of house of production born in eastern europe

the link is light field fotolia google it...it's from kiev in ukraine...450000 file in less than 2 years...they have many people working salary less than 600 dollar....model super cheap...try replicate it in usa. in serbia there is

https://shootset.com/search?p=22&sort=recommended&country=Serbia&radius=10

is a stock model agency...if you ever have browsed lifestyle content in fotolia with model release you will recognize thousand of photos with the same 10 20 model of this agency....
it's not that they love doing photos more than us...it's their cost areas cheap is still good to shoot lifestyle content....in italy good model cost 10 times the price i pay in ukraine....where i pay 10 dollarr hour and it's already much more than what many stocker from kiev pay.

In Serbia you pay 30$ for an average model but no model works for less than 20$ these days. Some with more experience have a wage as high as 65$/hr. So its pretty easy to see that an average set with 7-8 models will cost you around 1k. Not very expensive but not darn cheap either.

in serbia cost of life is one 4 of the rest of world...renting space is one tenth...model cost 30 dollar but you can find pretty darn good for 10 15 dollar.... it's not you or other serbian have more wish to shot is that you have cost 23 4 times inferior to the rest of the world...it's like producing cheap items in america or in china, it's not competitive for usa because cost are higher is the same....that'0s why most of house of production are in serbia russia and ukraine.
you have a portfolio that would have cost 5 times more than what you paid and you did in less than 2 3 year, try to work and produce such a portfolio in uk or italy ,, then you will see how much you would have earned and if you would have shot micro stock for living.....anyway next year i will move to belagreade for 2 months...already contacted many models from that agency and 30 dollar are for top notch model , other are happy with much less.

Jonbull do you mean 30, 10, 15 dollars per hour for models in Serbia?

from 10 to 30 dollar very good model. in ukraine 10 12 is enough , i was even quoted 15 from an agency for new faces..russia outside moscow is the same. but if you have good instagram you will be easily a requested photographer from lot of young teenager ready to improve their skill and have a bunch of photo for their instagram.. and believe me most of the time from model to non model the difference is minimal. they have a natural attitude in fronton camera written in dna.

Jonbull Prices you mention sound reasonable. I will try to contact some models for a couple of concepts I have in mind. Belgrade is not far from where I currently live - about one and a half hour flight. If financial terms end up positive, I can either fly to Belgrade or bring models to my location offering them an 8 day free vacation in an sea side airbnb villa with modern facilities including a pool, in exchange of their time - 5-6 hours photoshoot a day. TFV (time for vacation - flights included).  Will calculate costs and see if I should proceed or not.

I am happy I stopped feeding them (iStock) two years ago. I did not regret it. I am a lifetime professional, now retired, and the last eight years I am doing stock for the fun of it. I enjoy the process.  All my life so far I have learned to create high quality photo works that stands up in both commercial photography business and  microstock markets. My Work is worth more than the pennies this shady iStock agency decides to pay. So in respect of the efforts I put to create my photos, I decided that iStock IS NOT QUALIFIED TO HAVE MY PHOTO WORKS ANY MORE. Further I would like to encourage all stock photo contributors who feel they are being "used" by agencies like iStock, to consider submitting their work to agencies that give Value to the Works they produce. I believe we all should keep in mind that Respecting Our Efforts translates to respecting ourselves.

Thanks for sharing. Very good and well done videos. Subscribed.

Reading through forums I noticed some positive comments about Alamy, so I thought I would give Alamy a try. I started uploading to them about a year ago, and so far I have a portfolio of about 650 of my best commercial images on that site, and keep uploading selected images on a regular basis. So far I have zero sales. Not even 1 small sale. I will give Alamy three more months hoping I will see my first sale on that agency. If the $$ balance is still zero then, I will delete my portfolio and my account with them. Too much effort for no income. 

Same here. Shutterstock servers DO HAVE A PROBLEM. Uploading takes ages and creates errors in Filezilla and other software I use to upload. Often files arrive corrupted.
Other sites I upload to, uploading is fast and no problem.