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Messages - dragonblade

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126
If you're asking about resubmitting after a rejection, it really depends on the image, the rejection reason, and whether it looks good after you made whatever changes you thought were necessary.


The trouble is that AS are quite vague when it comes to rejection reasons for technical issues. They are not specific at all as to exactly why a particular image is rejected. It could be due to all manner of reasons - focus, noise, over processed etc. So it's hard to know exactly why a photo was rejected when they state 'technical reasons.' A lot of the time, I wouldn't know what to 'correct' since I'm left with a bunch of possible rejection issues. And sometimes none of them seem to apply to my particular image.

By the way, when I first started submitting photos to AS a few years ago, they were very strict with their review process. I had quite a few rejections but also quite a few accepted images also. Then later on, they appeared to be a lot less strict and most of my images were accepted nearly all the time. Well looks like they've become strict again just recently as my two latest commercial submissions were rejected. I don't see anything wrong with these images myself other than a bit of noise in the blue skies. I did do some noise reduction while retaining good sharpness. I also downsized the images somewhat. Maybe I should resubmit again with even smaller file sizes.


127

So, what SS is doing is misleading customers into thinking that if they sign up for a free trial on the annual subscription, they'll just be billed monthly. Instead, they're being forced to pay the entire year up front when the free trial ends.

Adobe use a similar tactic with the free trials of their editing software. Back in the old days, you could download a free Adobe trial for 30 days with no strings attached. Nice and simple. But then later on, they changed things and became very ruthless. Earlier this year, I downloaded a trial for Lightroom and Photoshop and the trial period was super short - about 15 days or less. Not only that but I would be billed after the trial ended (if I didn't cancel.) And I got the impression from their wording that I would be billed monthly which didn't sound too bad. Though some people advised me on another forum that that wasn't really the case. I would be billed for a whole year's worth after the end of the trial. I would not be happy about that at all.

I definitely cancelled when the trial ended but gosh, I was cutting it fine. I was editing images right until the very end. I cancelled just a few minutes before the cut off point. Frantically trying to go through the cancellation process as the clock was ticking. I may have avoided that massive bill by about a minute or so. I was so desperate to get that image editing done. Gosh, I'm glad that the internet didn't drop out or go super slow during this critical period.

128
I was curious how microstock was doing because it seems as if Big Tech during the pandemic started losing its collective mind and implementing all of these brazen anti-consumer business practices. I knew what was happening everywhere else, but I didn't expect to see this happening in microstock.

In the old SS forum, someone posted a link to a list of angry customer reviews regarding SS. It sounded like shady and deceptive business practices that buyers were unhappy with. This was a long time before the pandemic and it was a very long list.

129
Plus most of those earlier instances were quickly identified as hoaxes. w AI that won't be as easy.

Regarding the earlier cases of image deception, I would say it depends on the skills of the person doing the Photoshop job. Yea sure, the internet is full of crude and badly done examples. Well some are better than others. The big name publications generally feature better quality fakery with Photoshop etc.

As for me, I'm just going to worry about my own port and images regardless of how out of hand AI gets. Obviously, there's nothing I can do about the threat of AI or the inability of some agencies to correctly label it or categorise it. I'll just to continue to make the best images I can (the old fashioned way) and keep being creative.

130
You will not be able to believe any news backed up with videos, sound or photos anymore. Video, sound and photo evidence in courtcases will become useless

This isn't really a new issue. Similar sorts of image deception has been going on for a very long time now - especially with digital photography and software like Photoshop with image manipulation. Quite a few reputable newspapers and magazines have been guilty of using such software to lift certain elements from one image and add them on to another image to make a news story more dramatic or appealing. This is done with sports photography and I recall one example of natural disaster where a father holding a child on his shoulders was pasted on to a photo of a bush fire. National Geographic admitted to shifting the position of one of the pyramids in a photograph taken in Egypt. This sort of stuff has been going on for many years.

And discussions about the legitamacy of using photographs as evidence in court cases has been going on since at least the 1990s (with the advent of digital image manipulation.) Also, the internet has been filled with all sorts of heavily manipulated images for a very long time (blending fact and fiction.)

And before digital image manipulation became a thing, people were creating fakery in their photographs with more traditional means. Deceiving people with photographs is certainly nothing new. Remember that old story about the young girls who supposedly photographed fairies in their garden in the early 1900s? Many people were fooled by them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cottingley_Fairies

131
General Photography Discussion / Re: Advice Needed
« on: August 07, 2023, 20:34 »
Actually, it looks like it's a very similar situation under US law - according to this article.

https://www.copyright.gov/engage/photographers/

If you read the section titled "A Note on Works Made for Hire", it points out that copyright of the photographs belong to the client / employer.


132
General Photography Discussion / Re: Advice Needed
« on: August 07, 2023, 20:26 »
in the US it's the reverse the photographer/creator automatically owns the copyright

Yea here in Australia, it's very much the same generally. The person who takes the photograph owns the copyright to the image. The exception is if a client pays you money to take photographs for him / her. In that case, copyright of the images is transferred to the client.

133
General Photography Discussion / Re: Advice Needed
« on: August 07, 2023, 09:25 »
Wait for the photos to go up online and then DMCA them with the host. You own the copyright and they've not paid, so they can potentially have their website taken down for copyright infringement.

Further to that, if they do go online, you can send a second invoice for copyright infringement. Using a copyrighted photo without paying incurs a fine.

Generally, in scenarios like this, the client owns the rights to the images, not the photographer. Unless there is a contract that states otherwise. Though this may depend on the laws of the country where the photography work was done.

134
Dreamstime.com / Re: DT is a Nightmarestime
« on: August 05, 2023, 23:24 »
Always consistent sales and always part of the top MS agencies.

It's good to hear that you're getting consistent sales. You must be one of the few that do. For many people like myself, sales on DT are far from a regular occurrence. They are super slow. Though I will still contribute to DT (even after I reach payout.) All those sales do add up over time. It's still money in the bank. And the commissions are some of the best around for microstock agencies.

By the way, I'm not all that far from reaching my first payout there. I'm still hanging in there. Maybe in the future, I will have multiple payouts (though I know that will take an eternity!)

135
And yes, great for the thieves who get payment before being rumbled.

I remember when the old SS forum was still running, we would get thieves posting - asking questions about how to increase sales with their stolen content. The nerve of those people.

136
Last month I got around $1200 from Adobe. Previously that would have been 1200. But instead only around 1050 on my PayPal account, so I lost 150.

That does not seem right at all - or fair. Regardless, it sounds like you're doing extremely well with your sales. I'm assuming that you have a huge port with thousands of files?

137
Pond5 / Re: Dataset earnings - opt out
« on: August 02, 2023, 15:40 »
I find it strange that they didn't ask us permission about this first. And I don't recall any e-mail being sent out explaining what is going on with this plan involving artificial intelligence 'learning' from our own images and the compensation. It's like we're almost being kept in the dark about it.

138
Then I realized the description looked familiar and looked at one of my images of that area. It was copied verbatim by the AI uploader. The same thing had happened a few months back with a very different image of mine.

The same thing happened to me in the past on DT. Another contributor had copied a large portion of my description exactly - word for word. And yea I suspected that this was someone whose first language was not English. Regardless, I wasn't happy.

And yes, something should be done about this mess with the AI images and potential issues that buyers face. I agree that AI images should be specifically labelled as such and shouldn't appear in general searches.

139
It looks like this can be done very easily. I found a video tutorial here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sv-QS-K9GE

Though I do have some questions about the project settings. Any advice on which checkboxes to tick and which options to select in order to produce good quality video footage for stock?

Some things are obvious and straight forward like the resolution and frame rate. However, within Video Monitoring, we have 'Use 4:4:4 SDI', 'Use Level A for 3GB SDI', SDI configuration, data levels, video bit depth etc. And in Optimzed Media & Render Cache, it looks like there are some options regarding codecs. And other choices below that as well.

For a number of these things, is it best to leave them at default? I would likely be using ProRes 422 for the codec.

140
Just wondering if it's possible to use Davinci Resolve for compiling a time video from a sequence of digital stills? And if that's the case, does Resolve accept Tiff files?

141
Ive been checking out the specs of 4096 x 2304 videos on P5 and the bitrate varies enormously. Ive seen examples of 748mbps, 205mbps, 497mbps, 697mbps, 693mbps, 782mbps, 188mbps, 170mbps, 620mbps and 133mbps. There are also a few clips that have enormously high bitrates like 1.01gbps and 1.31gbps. The vast majority of those videos are not h264.

142
Pond5 / Re: Why is it so painful to upload to Pond5?
« on: July 30, 2023, 22:51 »
You can drag and drop  to POND5 upload page multiple files simultaneously. No slower really than FTP.

Ive tried that in the past and found it very problematic. Ive found that stock agency upload pages are usually fine for submitting photo files. But generally unreliable and buggy when submitting video files.

(spoiler - it's a small self-promotion) If you upload via Xpiks Cloud, we retry FTP upload until it succeeds on our side. So you only upload once to our (hopefully) reliable storage, and then we deal with Pond5.

Thanks for the recommendation. Ive been using Stocksubmitter with good success. Ive just about given up using the upload page for submitting videos.

143
Here's an article with accompanying images showing an AI generated model that's 'active' on social media. Looks like 'she' has a lot of followers despite not being real.

https://au.lifestyle.yahoo.com/stunning-bikini-model-racks-up-thousands-of-fans-online-despite-not-being-real-015746428.html

144
But they have to realize that sloppy reviewing floods their database with junk, and in the end, this doesn't do any good for their customers either.
In the end, they pass the reviewing over to their customers.: bad content doesn't sell and gets buried by the search engine algorithm.
That system works fine for the occasional error that reviewers make, but if you flood your database with junk, nobody will bother anymore to wade through it.

I remember some time ago in the past when reviewers at AS were really strict and fussy and it was hard to get some content accepted. In more recent times, they seem to be getting less strict and it's not often when I get rejections these days.

145
Shutterstock.com / Re: Shutterstock is an embarassment
« on: July 29, 2023, 00:53 »
He's trying again to sell courses - fine by me, but not at the expense of gaslighting contributors into believing such outlandish claims.

That's not the only thing he makes outrageous claims about. On the old SS forum, he stated that I didn't have any experience selling stock videos. I'm sorry but that is complete nonsense. I was selling stock videos on SS long before he joined that now extinct forum. And I had also sold videos through P5 as well.

Despite Doug Jenson's lies, I think I did okay with such a small video port on SS. In actual fact, it sounded like I did better than him when he first started on SS. In the beginning, I made three video sales from a port of 35 videos. I recall Doug saying that had about 200 videos or so when he first started on SS and made less sales than I did. Later on, I doubled the size of my video port and that effectively doubled my video sales.

146
Pond5 / Re: Why is it so painful to upload to Pond5?
« on: July 29, 2023, 00:08 »
You can drag and drop  to POND5 upload page multiple files simultaneously. No slower really than FTP.

Ive tried that in the past and found it very problematic. Ive found that stock agency upload pages are usually fine for submitting photo files. But generally unreliable and buggy when submitting video files.

147
Pond5 / Re: Awaiting payment
« on: July 28, 2023, 01:57 »
Ah thanks. Looks like I'll have to wait a bit then. It's been so long since Ive made payout that I guess I forgot that payment is sent out once a month.

148
Pond5 / Awaiting payment
« on: July 28, 2023, 00:48 »
I recall that the minimum for payout on P5 is $25 (if I recall correctly.) My latest sale yesterday put me well above $25. I also recall that payment is automatically released when the minimum amount is obtained. That's the way it worked in the past for me. Ive never had to put in a manual request for payment.

There has been no e-mail regarding the payment release from PayPal. I also signed into my PayPal account and no money has come in. Don't think I have had a delay like this before.

149
Woah, I just sold a video through P5. So rare when that kind of thing happens these days. $37.97 for an editorial video (HD resolution.) It's also nice to know that good commissions can still be had. In fact, for my previous sale though P5, I got the highest commission Ive ever had for a HD video.

Though my worry is how much longer will good commissions still be around for. It could only be a matter of time until the new owners (SS) run it into the ground.

150
An excellent technical discussion. Thanks for starting it dragonblade!

You're welcome!

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