Yes, SS contributors get the world map, the catalog manager - I wish istock offered us tools like that.

I also wish istock came up with them first...

That's because Istock spend all their time and (our) money giving holidays to inspectors and the 'in-crowd' in Milan, London, Tokyo, etc.

@fujiko - I sincerely hope you're joking.

iStock is still struggling to answer a simple buyer question about whether a clipping path is included with all file sizes or just medium or up (or just the largest size). It's more the fact that they can't answer the question about how their own site works that I find so pitiful.

iStock help forum has people commenting that the search index hasn't updated - earlier this week I had a sale on an image that was approved earlier in the day. If SS can do that, why does iStock routinely take 48 hours or more to update theirs?

If it weren't for Sean's greasemonkey scripts, the iStock my uploads page would be unusable in its latest form.

iStock's software department is a complete shambles, but in addition, they do things like work on a Feast site, and supposedly on supporting PNGs (today's contact sheet had a "we really are still working on this" update for all those who figures that PNGs have gone the way of logos). Heaven knows what will eventually happen to Logos, and although we're forced into the PP there's no sign of independent content actually go there (they said it'd take to the end of the year).

iStock used to lead the way with new features (some of them like the forumeter too awful to continue) but that was when someone who gave a toss about the future of the business was running it (as opposed to the current owners who only care about how much money they can draw from it this year and next).

Yes, SS contributors get the world map, the catalog manager - I wish istock offered us tools like that.

I also wish istock came up with them first...

I think the time when iStock was innovative are firmly in the past now - except, perhaps, for what goes on on the accounting side.

I saw this and my initial impression was "cool - I want to make a new catalog for each model I have so I can promote them in every situation that i've photographed them in"...and then I realized I'm limited to 5 options.  I need to figure out how to best optimize the opportunity - I think some thinking is required over the weekend.

You are limited to 5? I don't think so I think you can ''promote'' any number of catalog, but you are only limited to 5 in viewing the earning in your Dashboard?

Very useful toy. I would have preferred that the values listed were "total earned", RPI and RPD. I know I can calculate them myself, but it would make it easier to see what kind of shoot was more profitable, without doing math.

I like the tool, although I'd love to see some more refinements. They did a great job putting this together, and I do hope they'll keep improving it.

So if I create a set with images selected, it puts them in the set automatically. That's good, but Lightroom has a great feature with  a checkbox for including the selected images - in case the selection and set have nothing to do with one another.

I'd love to have the catalog sortable by sales volume, $$, date so I can see if there's one star image or a bunch of good performers. You can click on the gallery stats and get a new window, but that's not sortable by earnings, only by downloads and date; it's also impossible to see most sets in their entirety in the gallery stats view as each entry takes up a ton of space. Nothing like as nice as the newer catalog set window.

I'd like to see icons in the corner (again like Lightroom) for images that are in a set and if you click & hold on that it tells you which set. You might not want to have an image in multiple sets and seeing that you'd already put the image somewhere would be helpful.

I guess the biggie is I'd like any image that is in a set to have a link on the page the customer sees to the rest of the set. It's not what the tool was designed for, but I think it'd work well to show buyers related images (without the stats obviously).

I don't see my latest batch, approved on Oct 4, in the catalog manager.  Hmmmmmm.