I will give you my opinion.

I do not believe that drones will displace traditional photography.

there have been many technologies that have come along, such as drones, action cameras, timelapse, 3d video, 3d photo, 360 footage, etc, and although each seemed cool when they were released, none of them have become a major part of photographic market share.

although drones will earn you money, the traditional methods of earning money will not be displaced.

in addition, drones can often only fly for 15 minutes, so you do not get as much filming time as you do with traditional filming methods.

I thought about using drones as a form of jib but decided that my traditional methods of filming were profitable and it was not worth the risk to start all over again with a device that has a strong learning curve.

for that reason, I decided to leave the drone-style photo and video work to people who are dedicated to it, and I will continue to do the method that has been working for me the past few years.

good luck

you said: "I just finished photographing a $1.5million property the images remain as my copyright."

that has nothing to do with the original poster. the original poster described a work for hire arrangement under which he would not be the copyright owner.

you said: "almost half of them never appear"

I am a computer programmer and have maintained computer networks for many years.

the number one cause of the type of problem you describe is lack of disk space. the second likely cause will be throttleing which can be caused by CPU processes or disk I/O.

I would guess they ran out of disk space on a temporary drive. they probably didn't make their temporary drive big enough and they hit the limit once in a while.

the database has a record for the file, but the file fails to copy to the temporary drive, and then the file doesn't exist on disk, but it exists in the database, so you see the info online but the file disappeared.

it is possible a lot of files are being transferred across an internal network, and the connection drops, and instead of resuming the file transfer, they abandon it, and then you have half-sent files that cannot be processed because they are not properly written and get rejected. but they are still in the database as explained before. that's another possibility.

it is easy to fix. the problem is people don't know how to fix it. the first thing you might think is to check if each file is transferred properly. but the problem is that you have to determine which files you have already checked, and which files have not been checked yet. technically you need to recheck every file, every time you check, which would take forever. so they would need a system to put the file into a batch, because the files might not be submitted in the same order as their id's. then you just check each batch, and if the batch is good, you never check it again, and if the batch is bad, you resend all the problem files. but if the logic is not in their system then they will lose files.

you said: "the only way ANY stock photo could be used without payment as fair use with any news article is if the photo itself is the centre of the story."

wrong.

http://archive.cmsimpact.org/sites/default/files/documents/pages/principles_in_fair_use_for_journalism.pdf

"USING COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL FOR THE SPECIFIC PURPOSE OF STARTING OR EXPANDING A PUBLIC DISCUSSION OF NEWS"

"The use of copyrighted material to promote public discussion and analysis can qualify as fair use. "

"The use of textual, visual and other quotations of cultural material for purposes of reporting, criticism, commentary, or discussion constitutes fair use. "

re: "We know that because it's stock. "

Copyright laws are written by the federal government through the legislative branch. The judicial branch interprets the laws.

anything that a stock agency says is not law and not interpretation of law, and has no legal precedence whatsoever.

American citizens are under no obligation to follow the desires of stock agencies unless the stock agencies are in compliance with federal laws.

the use of this dreadlock photo is fair use. we know this because the news article is about dreadlocks, and the photo is dreadlocks. under the fair use doctrine in the US, the photo can be used without permission from the copyright holder, and without payment to the copyright holder. in addition, the watermark on the photo is transformative and fair use, as upheld in court.

many stock sites will make the thumbnail from the frame at 1 sec (30th frame). some might use the first frame, which is less accurate.

in theory, if a stock agency has a minimum 5 sec requirement for video length, it makes sense that the frame at 2.5 seconds would be a good frame for the thumbnail since it is the midpoint in the action. this would solve your problem.

perhaps you could contact adobe and ask them which frame they pick and suggest they use a different frame.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#U.S._fair_use_factors

"the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals found in favour of the defendant, Arriba Soft. In reaching its decision, the court utilized the statutory four-factor analysis. First, it found the purpose of creating the thumbnail images as previews to be sufficiently transformative, noting that they were not meant to be viewed at high resolution as the original artwork was." ... the court found that the thumbnails were fair use."


the use of watermarked images is Fair Use as explained above.

I can get the GPS data form the photo, so I need a site that has a database of photos with the GPS info. using google images leads to lots of photos with stripped EXIF data.

I know these sites exist because I have seen them before.

if you are not being compensated for the sales, then you should file a DMCA take down notice to the web site owner. US based web sites have agents who are registered with the federal government, and it will include a mailing address.

you will send them the notice, the list of urls, what you believe is something that you own the copyrights to, and send it to their DMCA agent. the agent has to respond to it within a reasonable time, they will ask the other party for their side of the story, and if they determine you are the copyright owner and it is being used without permission, the site has to take the material down.

other countries might have different DMCA style laws.

if it is an international site, in a different country than you are, check if they are a signatory to the Berne convention (which means your copyright is protected by all signatory countires), and check WIPO for their procedure that resembles the DMCA.

you said: "Interesting. Did you do this solely for submitting to stock agencies, or was it workrelated?"

I started by selling BRoll.

I did some filming by going to different locations in town but it does not sell that well.

I then did some tests where I would go on vacation, film something, and try to sell it. when I went on a trip, I made most of my money from the filming I did in the airport or on the plane, and little from filming the final destination.

now, I make arrangements to film for example every day for 30 days. I hire actors and schedule 1 per day. after I do 30 days of filming, I spend another 45 days or so editing photos and keywording. I will end up with about 20,000 or more photos and maybe 1000 videos. then I spend many weeks or months uploading. I upload about 1,000 to 2,000 photos per week. many of the actors know each other, and the crew also, so it ends up being a lot of fun because I am working with people who are friends with each other.

when the weather changes, and it is time to film again, I do a casting call to locate more actors and repeat the process.

When a person contacts you, and asks you to photograph something, and pays you for it, it is a work for hire situation, and the person paying for and ordering the work is the owner of the copyrights upon creation (not the photographer). This is the situation as presented by the original poster.

The owner of the copyright goes to who produces the work, not to the camera operator. The person that produces the work is the person that pays for, directs, requests, and otherwise controls what the final product is. The situation presented by the original poster is a work for hire. He does not own the copyright to the photos under that situation. He is not acting of his own to create the photos, the client is directing and instructing him as to what she wants in the final product, and therefor, she owns the copyright.

When applying for a copyright with the US copyright office, the person who operates the camera would not be mentioned during the copyright application.

If the original poster had of his own will created his own ideas as to what to film, and then tried to sell his work to the woman, the photographer would be the copyright owner, and the woman would not be. But this is not the case.

does anyone know if alamy accepts photos from a D3400 camera? after I bought this camera, alamy began rejecting all of my photos.

you said: "The photographer is a freelancer - this is not a 'work for hire' scenario"

wrong. he was approached by a woman who asked him to film her animals. it is a work for hire.

freelance would mean he shot a bunch of animals and then proposed selling them to the woman, which he suggested as an alternative.