Yep, same here. They had been picking up nicely and were on par with DT, 123RF and FT. But Nov took a nosedive and Dec has come to a grinding halt.

System upgrade and server relocation? Yea, right... Most companies post a notice in advance that the site is going to be down. And then do the work during low traffic time or weekends.

The site went down, was down for quite a while, and then they posted the system upgrade and server relocation message. C'mon.

What it should say is something like "Our single server with one hard drive failed and we're scrambling to order new parts and then perform a full backup. We expect this to take about 24 hours but who knows."

Mark - some sites aren't picky about quality (i.e. Snapvillage) while other sites lately have been tightening up their quality requirements a lot (DT, IS, StockXpert).

If you want your approval rating to improve drastically, you need a DSLR. New Nikon D40, Canon Rebel 350D/XT, Pentax K110D, and Olympus E-330 kits can be had for around $400. Or buy a used/refurb DSLR on ebay for a couple hundred bucks.

Seems that the "poor sensor performance" responses are telling you you're in for a long battle trying to get the SD750 images accepted.

I also had several thousand images from various cameras. I quickly came to the conclusion I was wasting my time with rejections, bought better equipment, started from scratch, and now have a very high acceptance rate just about everywhere.

It would help to have more details. What are the rejection reasons?

DT has been inconsistent for me. They'll approve 100% of my stuff for weeks and will then suddenly reject a handful for reasons that don't seem accurate. For me, if IS says something is wrong, when I check the picture they're usually right. 

One thing to be careful of with DT is that the search engine takes your approval rating into account. I'm not sure exactly how much affect this has but from what I understand, the lower your rating, the further back you end up in search results and vice versa. So I wouldn't be experimenting with DT. Submit what you're confident will be accepted. Do a search for your images and see where they are.

Also, Hatman pointed out that they seem to rotate search criteria regularly. I'll have steady downloads for weeks and then it literally stops for days or weeks.

I'm having some problems with posterization (example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posterization). It's nowhere as bad/obvious as the Wikipedia example but can be seen faintly in shadows when viewed at 100%. It's really obvious at 200%.

I've switched to shooting RAW with my Nikon D80 and convert the NEF to a PSD with ACR and then the final is saved as a 8-bit JPG. I try to nail exposure while shooting and make minimal adjustments in ACR and PSE. This has helped but it's still a time consuming pain to paint/smudge the posterized shadow blobs.  If I don't like the quality of the end result I don't even bother submitting it anywhere. I spent three hours shooting last Saturday and scrapped most of them because they would take too long to fix.

I'm guessing it's something in my workflow that is causing this. If it's equipment, then I may upgrade (D300?) or even switch (40D?).

Anybody else running into this and have suggestions?

Paul

FT give me the largest amount of rejects and the least amount of sales.  They are going down!

Is it time to remove them from the Big 6? 

Not in my optinion. I've had a 100% acceptance rate for the past three months with dozens of images and it was my #3 earner until an EL at DT just bumped FT to #4. I like FT.

That's a tough one. It's between Istock and Shutterstock, but I'd lean toward Istock. 

23 images with 600 sales at IS? That's pretty impressive.

IS was slow for me at the start. The first couple of months I only had 5-10 images. For whatever reason, suddently the third month took off and sales are now picking up very nicely. I see the momentum and potential with IS. SS is doing very well for me also.

The other 10 sites are a distant third making up less than 20% of my earnings combined.

Maybe my images just aren't a fit for DT. I've had rejections that are questionable (same images are accepted and selling at SS and/or IS) and sales are very poor. I sold more at Snapvillage than DT in November.

With FT I've had almost no rejections and it's slowly picking up momentum. Currently my #3 earner overall.

Congratulations!  Great image.

My rejection rate has improved. Last couple of batches had no rejections.

I've never seen so many folks suffering over an obviously defective stock web site. Piece of advice: When you poke yourself in the eye with a sharp stick don't do it again.

The reason I stick with them is because it has potential.

Despite the fact that it's a trainwreck, is difficult to upload to, and I'm sure the buyers are having problems too, I'm actually getting sales and showing some growth. I can set the sale amount and average sales earnings are higher than most other sites for me. 

Imagine the possibilites if it actually worked right and got out of this never-ending "beta".

I can't comment on the Sony, but had a S9100 and didn't care for it.

If you're just taking general snapshots and don't make big prints, it's fine. It has a great list of features but in real world usage they don't perform well consistently. Focus in normal room lighting was constantly hunting even with the assist.

I think you'll have a difficult time using it for the stringent noise requirements for stock. Even when I shot at ISO80 I saw faintly visible shadow and dark area noise when the image was fit to the monitor. When I viewed the image at 100% I was pretty surprised with the amount of noise in darker areas.

Again, a casual shooter who is moving up from a P&S will probably love it. If you have owned a DSLR you may find its performance is closer to a P&S than a DSLR. But then again, I'm pretty picky.