The way I understand it, you choose a license type (RF vs RM) for each image.

Oops, you're right, GeoPappas, I misunderstood this, at first it looked to me like a global choice. You can select Rights Managed or Royalty Free on a per image basis. Sorry about the confusion.

From one of the FAQ's:

Which License Type is Right for Me?
The PhotoShelter Collection is a marketplace for commercial stock imagery, and our buyers are generally sophisticated photo buyers who license images for a living. They are very familiar with all of the various licensing methods. Deciding which license type is right for you is a personal business decision that you must make.

Our research shows that commercial photo buyers do not favor one license type over the other; they just have a need to come up with a price quickly and easily. The PhotoShelter Collection pricing system for both RM and RF provide them with the quick and easy pricing the need, no matter which method of pricing you choose.

If you are not a full-fledged professional photographer, you are new at pricing, and you are not sure what kind of demand there will be for your work, we recommend that you follow our suggested default pricing categories in either in RM or RF.

Some photographers will price all of their images according to one license type, but some will use a mix; pricing certain types of images as RF and others as RM.

Also, don�t be shy about asking your peers for help or opinions. Check out the Forums for discussions on the topic of licensing and pricing. You�ll soon find out that this is a very hot topic, as some people tend to feel passionately about one license type over another.

My first post here after lurking quietly for a while... (blush)

I went to PhotoShelter's Chicago seminar last week and signed up out of curiosity (post 3 to 10 eval images). I got accepted, then saw the pricing when I processed a few images.

I spoke with one of PhotoShelter's founders afterward (one of the coolest last names I have ever seen, "Sanschagrin") and heard some interesting background.

They seem to be comparing their offer to Getty (who has their share of trouble these days), more than running up against the microstocks. I still don't know what "midstock" is exactly, maybe this is in that vicinity.

For licensing, a contributor has to choose RF or RM as a single choice across all images. You can change the choice any time I think, and it applies to all future sales and images. There's a sample pricing wizard to see what RM rates would apply for different uses and volumes.

For each image, PhotoShelter defaults to a middle range out of three choices (whether you opt for RF or RM) and the contributor can keep the default or price each image lower or higher, and change pricing any time. (You can set "profiles" and reuse the profiles for certain types of images.) But you can't set an arbitrary price tag on images.

Compared to most microstock sites I've used the past few weeks (haven't uploaded many images yet) I was quite impressed by this process, usability, and quality of their site. Even the way they map keywords to an internal database seems to make sense. It takes a while to prepare an image though, comparable to IS.

The huge difference with PhotoShelter is the contributor keeps 70% of the sale. (To ramp up, they are offering 85% of all sales for images uploaded before sometime early Nov.)

They have budgeted to spend around $1M in a first round of advertising, at launch. It's one thing to have images and a solid site; but another to bring a volume of buyers.

Interesting discussion here about what images would be posted exclusively or not, on lower vs. higher cost sites. I don't have my mind made up on this.