For me, image exclusivity could be the saviour of my relationship with iStock/Getty.  Due to their actions and policies, I currently feel stuck between a rock and a hard place.

The 'rock' being the hugely restrictive (on contributors, not on iStock) exclusive ASA, which (if followed honestly, and I do) requires contributors to place a very high level of trust in the company, at times that can be a major challenge.

But dropping exclusivity would put me in a 'hard place' where my content would be duplicated all over Getty's bottom priced sites, earning less than 15% royalties, and - with that being the case, and having a living to make - I'd be compelled to spread my work across a whole bunch of sites, all with different prices, royalty rates and levels of competence.

So as I see it just now, the viable alternative is to completely sever my relationship with iStock/Getty and get back control of my own work.  But obviously that would come with a total RF earnings drop, followed by a long period of building earnings back up.  Suppose there's also always the possibility that any of us could get "Locke'd", and have the decision made for us, who knows.

But IMO a better solution, which could work very well for iStock/Getty and for contributors, would be to offer image exclusivity.  It's been suggested a fair bit, especially recently, and I didn't miss the opportunity to mention it in the survey.  But it would be interesting to get views on it here.

Would indys consider removing files from all other sites to have them exclusive with iS/Getty, having them mirrored to Getty rather then TS etc, and at a better royalty rate?  And would exclusives go for it, or prefer to just stick with full artist exclusivity? 

Now that EdStock's fast-growing portfolio has over 120,000 images (far larger than the Vetta and Agency collections combined), I'm starting to wonder if there's any point left in submitting new Editorial work to iStock.

The problem is that no matter the age of EdStock's files, they get sorted by the date they were uploaded to iStock, rather than the date they were taken.  That's unfortunately the exact opposite of what we were told when EdStock was introduced ('On a technical note, we will be dating these files so that our system recognizes their original creation date, and not the date they are uploaded to iStock. This is being done to ensure that these new files do not dominate our Best Match sort en masse.' - www.istockphoto.com/forum_messages.php?threadid=330294).  The files may (sometimes) be properly dated with their original creating date, but it doesn't seem to help - that's not what is being recognised by the system, as its very easy to see when sorting results by 'File Age'.

So when a fresh dumping of hundreds or thousands of EdStock files with a certain keyword lands on the iStock collection, the fact that they were taken at different points over the last twelve years or more doesn't matter - they go to the front of the 'File Age' sorting, and at or near the front of the Best Match.  Good luck to people who uploaded images for any partular location/brand/subject before a consignment of EdStock content arrives.

Since August last year I've been doing my best to bring this to the attention of the fine people at iStock, but so far there seems to be absolutely zero interest.  No response to the sitemails, emails, support tickets or complaints raised on the subject, except to say that I should not mention it in iStock forum.  My guess is that if they do one day communicate about it, it'll be to say something along the lines of 'yeah well, best match will sort it out over time'.

But check out an editorial-only search for 'Volkswagen' which received an EdStock dumping last autumn.  Still there on the first page of results is a portrait of Bernd Pischetsrieder taken almost eleven years ago.  The photo was taken in 2001 when Mr Pischetsrieder was about to take over as chairman of VW.  He then left VW in 2006.  No problem with the image being among EdStock's portfolio, it's just a good example of a very old EdStock file, which is placed far above editorial images from other contributors, taken ten years later, in October 2011.

As new (well, mostly old) EdStock content arrives, all the recently arrived editorial content from everybody else gets pushed pages and pages back.  Sometimes if a file managed to sell well before the EdStock onslaught, best match might put it ahead of a new block of EdStock content, but the vast majority of files just get buried.

Try an Editorial-only search for any of these to see examples where everybody else's work gets displaced by slabs of EdStock content:
Los Angeles | Berlin | Volkswagen | Edinburgh | Rome | Government | France

Seems that if you do have Editorial content on iStock, you just have to keep your fingers crossed until the day when a huge batch of EdStock files will come along and take their place in front of yours.

/long-winded-rant

..putting that user in the top five of all contributors by number of files on the site.

Does anybody know if the promised work that was going to be done to bring Edstock's work closer to the standard required for everyone else on iStock was even started before this new gigantic ingestion?  Or was that just quietly dropped like so many other things?  Suppose we may as well forget about it if JJRD and his team would have to go though 15,000 files.  Maybe it'll be 30,000 files by this time next week.

And - in case you want a laugh - from the OP of the original thread about the Edstock ingestion: The content will be treated just like any other content on iStockphoto and is not being given any special treatment.

...what would your priorities be?

You're moving to Calgary.  Taking account of iStock's current position in the marketplace, and its context within the Getty group of companies, what changes would you put into action immediately, and what would your longer term aims and priorities be?  And why?

[disclaimer - I'm very willing to accept this may just be a coincidence!]

Just wondering, has anybody else seen a trend at weekends, with a higher than usual proportion of downloads being first time sales?  I've not properly gone through my stats or anything, but it does seem that although I get way fewer downloads at weekends, of the sales I do get, a much higher ratio are first ever downloads for a file.

Anyone else seeing the same?

Firstly, sadly it seems this is a taboo subject for discussion on iStock.  This thread http://www.istockphoto.com/forum_messages.php?threadid=322302&page=1 - "Is it new Best Match or my wrong Keywording?" in the help forum was locked, and a follow-up thread was not only locked, but also deleted from the site.

The concern is that files with a larger number of keywords are getting unusually poor placing in best match searches.  If this is true it would mean that official iStock guidance on keywords is no longer relevant (no pun intended  ).  We've been actively encouraged to provide lots of of useful information in our keywords, since terms like 'photography', 'horizontal', 'nobody', 'indoors' or whatever can improve search terms for buyers.  And the official position was that best match placing was not disadvantaged by having a high number of relevant keywords.

I'm not saying that I'm sure that lots of keywords = poor best match position (if an image picks up some early downloads it's often not the case), but it is looking like maybe it's a factor, whether on purpose or by mistake.

Certainly I've found that a lot of my own uploads over the past 6 months or so can be found right at the back of searches.  I usually invest a fair bit of time in tagging files with as many relevant, potentially useful keywords as possible.

These results below could have moved around for other reasons - another best match shift or whatever.  Also, these aren't brand new files, so it's not possible to know how things would have gone if they'd only had a few keywords from the start.

Anyway, for a couple of recent-ish files of mine that were at the back of tens of thousands of results, this is what happened...


Macro raspberry photo - uploaded 3rd February 2011

Best match position searching for 'raspberry' yesterday was approx #12980 (page 65 of 67, 200 results per page)

Removed keywords:
berry fruit, colour, food, macro, photography, ripe, selective focus, simple, sweet food, small, healthy eating, local produce, many, nobody, vibrant colour, saturated colour, ...

Keywords now:
raspberry, close-up, freshness, red, fruit, berry

Best match position now is approx #9705 (page 49 of 67)


Cherry photo - in the exclusive+ collection - uploaded 22nd November 2010

Best match position searching for 'cherry' yesterday was roughly #18035 (near the bottom of page 92 of 92, 200 results per page)

Removed keywords:
berry fruit, close-up, colour, directly above, food, fruit, gingham, group of objects, nobody, photography, raw, red, ripe, saturated colour, bunch, clean, healthy eating, indoors, local produce, macro, pattern, simple, stalk, summer, sweet food, three objects, white, wet, droplet, fabric, cotton, seasonal food, ...

Keywords now:
cherry, traditional, freshness, fruit, tablecloth

Best match position now is approx #11070 (page 55 of 91)

And an example with fewer results:

Fern koru uploaded 17th March 2011

Best match postion searching for 'Koru' was #65 out of 67 files

Removed keywords:
flora, beginnings, brown, close-up, fragile, green, growth, life cycle, origins, photography, small, spiral, vertical, bracken, circle, curled up, foliage, forest, frond, nobody, outdoors, shape, softness, tree fern, detail, radial symmetry, countryside, pure, selective focus, spring

Keywords now:
fern, freshness, new zealand, nature, koru

Best match position searching for 'Koru' is now #11 out of 67.

Please note, this is not an attempt to figure out how to 'game' the best match.  I'm trying to work out if - by doing what iStock officially advise on keywords - I'm spending time and effort on sending my work to the far back of search results.

Any suggestions?  And thanks if you managed to read all the way down to here