Ronnie Hall (not verified) on Tue, 2009-11-10 11:26
I am getting a complete blank on my applications to join istockphoto, even though I am confident that my photos meet their criteria and are as good as some photos already on the site. I have been rejected four times now - and the third time there was no comment on criteria, simply that the photos were not 'diverse' enough! I have the distinct feeling that nothing I submit will be accepted, and that the bar has been raised, but I do not know how to find out if this is the case. Any ideas?
Istock is certainly not a top 10 agency for may reasons:
1. Poor to very poor interface (compared to Dreamstime and other Fotolia for instance).
2. Complicated and long upload & keywording process
3. Support almost nonexistent (it looks like it's actually a server that does the support, not human beings).
But worst of all, their website's application is full of bugs. Try to upload image for review and right after send a message to support, you will automatically receive a rejection message (from the server) for your images (minutes after, meaning that no editor has had time to review it).
Again, is there a pilot in the plane or is it a conscious policy to reject automatically new photographs ?
And don't dare to ask for explanations when the same images have been accepted everywhere else...
istock, when arrogance meets a very poor service...
Not quite sure how this comment fits into the middle of the thread about joining, but with the sales figures as they are there is no way, no matter how much you dislike it, that it is not a top 5. They definitely belong up there, measured on sales, images, contributors and any other metric I can think of - including photographer ire.
I have to side with you on the issues after F5, it's was all decidedly shaky with broken links, ophaned pages etc, and dodgy search for several days most of that is sorted now?
no website that big is ever perfect, especially in those dark corners. Poor interface? - well Controlled vocab often gets peoples back up because, well, yes it's tedious at first until you learn the way it works. (personally I didn't like the new search at all).
Im guessing you have read http://microstockinsider.com/guides/photographer-application-process-get...
Is istock the first site you have joined? Yes amateurs can join and still have their work accepted, but in this respect I'm talking about amateurs at stock photography/learning stock, not an amateur photographer who wants to make money from a photo of a sunset or family cat. - so no photos of flowers, pets, motion blurs or skies, even if you see something similar on the site already, try to be conceptual and play safe with the initial submission.
Henri Faure (not verified) on Tue, 2009-11-17 13:04
Do not send photos to iStockphoto. It is no longer the most powerful in terms of sales, indeed Fotolia and Dreamstime can do better. I have been contributor in iStock since November 2007. At the beginning all was at its best, I uploaded lots of photos and my sales increased. Then I became exclusive and my sales kept growing from 80 files per month to 120 in January 2009. But on February 17th, my sales dropped from an average of 5/day to less than 1 per day. Since then I could not sell more than 2 files peer day and last week was dreadful with only 8 files sold. I worked hard to upload 500 files - in fact 1000 because 50% files are rejected - and when I began to earn some money, they threw me by the window. Impossible to know why my sales dropped in one night. The support says that its because the quality of other contributors has increased, but if you look at the database, you dont see a significant quality increase and anyway the quality on the files could not increase 10 fold in one single night, on February 17th. What they did with me. They used my files to draw traffic via Google paying me only 25% of the price and when I could earn some money they pushed my sales down. In iStock there are some happy few who sell 300 files a day or more and earn several thousand Dollars per month. These contributors are protected and most customers are directed to these contributors. The new ones see their best files rejected when the risk to compete with those of the happy few, I was here only to make volume and to attract people from the net. Other contributors took the money and iStock make fantastic profits without any risk.
I think we've known for a while that istock has been loosing ground to others considering they were once the biggest. Each agnecy has its quirks that photographers love to hate. I do think it's way to far to suggest its not a good place to upload, they are still one of the big 5 and still recommended. Sounds like you were a victim of their 'best match' changes which chooses which image to display based on all sorts of 'secret sauce' criteria. all agencies do it or their search results would be full of spammed keywords. Perhaps you had a good run of sales before, lots of people felt the new system was a lot more fair - including myself with just a very marginal increase on more popular images, stopping what seemed to be a downward trend
We still need to deliver useful stock week in week out.Some contributors take there eye of the ball and some even fall ill with a new disease.C.V.M... creative vetta madness.Like they have taken some adobe steroid and pumped up the volume and effort in post processing.They sit in front of there PC's for hours and hours straining to get ever detail from the shadows and generally wasting there precious time as no f##### can afford to buy them !.. Henri,go back to basics.Simple images with copyspace for print.
This site has been raising prices and lowering commissions to its contributors since being purchased by Getty in 2006. It no longer represents good value to either image shoppers or photographers selling work, offering commissions as low as 15%, the worst by far in the industry. Do the artists a favour and buy their work from elsewhere!
iStock was once the place to be, but since they nearly halved their commissions to contributors in late 2010 they are to be avoided like the plague. Don't waste your time contributing, it's a pain, they reject perfectly good images for arbitrary reasons, the forums are teeming with rabid fanboys, and they have no reason to keep commissions where they are since most people took the last pay cut. Not me, I'm outta here...
istockphoto search is no longer the best. It ignores good matches in favor of higher priced items and changes randomly so often it is impossible to use it in a consistent manner. Anyway, there is no option to exclude their higher priced collections from a search - so istockphoto is really a $30+ per photo agency these days, I'd argue that takes it out of the 'microstock' range and into some intermediate area. As a buyer I still have a bias towards it, having used the site for so long, but frankly I use it as a last resort these days.
I hear you alax, I've already been fairly vocal over the past few years about how the search at istock has been gradually whittled at until its become (as of 2011 for me) unusable. the results are indeed a mine-field of premium priced images that you can't sort by and istock have made it clear that there will be filtering/ordering features to allow sort by price. its a real shame, with all the keywords disambiguated the results should be excellent, and indeed are better than most if it were not for the various ill motived annoyances.
e.g. try a search between shutterstock and istock for "camera book" (i.e. a photo of a book and camera to emote learning or books about cameras etc) at time or writing on SS all you get is a page after page of books with not a photo with a camera in sight, istockphoto at least does show me a photo of a camera sitting on an open book - perfect!
It's only when you use search in earnest that you really see problems arise. Personally iI've stopped buying from IS long ago, SS is only acceptable if you are tied to that subscription otherwise it would be very temptng to go somewhere else, searching images is not easy
I recently joined istock, and I am also dissappointed with their rejection ratio, upload cap, disambiguation needs and review time. Nowadays I am putting a fewer keywords to lessen the upload harassment. But I may not stop uploading there.. I hope they will change things soon for better.
istock will change when they have to - but that's not guaranteed. This is only my opinion, but from external appearances istock seems partially paralyzed by what seems like an internal morass of 'big business'. They will either change or suffer some mortification at Getty's hands. No company is too large to fail and the larger they are and the less in touch with customers and contributors they get more likely that is. Once trust has been lost (for many that is already the case) then it's very hard to win back.
BUT... (isn't there always one) the large contributors with bargaining power to create bulk image submissions, bargain for higher royalties etc. can more than supply istock with 'most' of it's fresh image needs, meaning 'they can do this'.
It's interesting to hear this from a newbie(if you are?), most experienced microstockers, tho perhaps upset at times, look at their income from istock and, perhaps begrudgingly continue uploading; things are always changing and falling istock incomes might mean a revaluation for many. For me its the little things that annoy, a seemingly 'well controlled' amount of free speech in the istock forums (bans, locked threads etc) troubles me deeply - and would from any business.
Hi, Im a graphic designer and I'm interested in uploading my vectored artwork to microstock sites. Where is the best place to start. Initially I was going to start with istockphoto but after reading some of the comments I am obviously having doubts. Could someone give me a list of say the top ten to contribute to.
I presume Fotolia is up there. I just want sites that are going to give me a fair rate for my uploads.
Thanks
I'm not a vector illustrator so I'll highlight that first.
Theres a growing trend in crowdsourced content to have single marketplaces that sell all kinds of media (video, still and vector, and perhaps also audio, templates, 3d models, even scripts and code) so with that in mind think carefully about specialist vector-only sites and those larger agencies with an established client base who sell photos and also vectors - the later might be just as good if not better
I have been looking at the comments at this blog about istock.. but I don't understand it...
I started uploading a month ago at 123rf, dreamstime, canstockphoto, bigstock, istock and shutterstock. I have been accepted by all but the only one that was really difficult to get in to was shutterstock. istock was really the easyist one. they accept almost anything even when I saw some technical mistakes in my pictures. they even accepted a photo that I now regret uploading because it not looks professional when I look at my portofolio. and I am annoyed when I want to add a editorial image the description is never good while other angencies accept it.and my acceptence ratio is gone low because of that I tried it a couple of times.
I think its not really far because thet didnt reject the photo they rejected the discription.. pff and I already got 51photo's online and I dont even have views and on other angencies I do have a lot mor views..pff
Over the past few years istock has transformed itself from the hardest but best selling place to sell your images (i.e. strict reviews) to opening the flood-gates to everything. I hear what you are saying about quality now, the istock collection is now peppered with bad photos; wrong, spammy or plain misleading descriptions and meta data - it was only 2 years ago that their collection was the best curated, tightly managed in the industry. i'd like to think that they have some secret-sauce technology that is working to protect buyers from the bad images through historic views, reputation and sales - but sadly I don't think that is the case.
This change (less than 18 months ago for the review quality) makes reading information about istock difficult, espeically when what should be quality references like books on the subject are now out of date. There are still references to 'istock' the leadng microstock site, shuttestock took on that role several years ago.
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is it still possible for amateurs to join?
Ronnie Hall (not verified) on Tue, 2009-11-10 11:26Certainly not a top 10 agency
Jab (not verified) on Sat, 2010-11-13 16:58Not quite sure how this
Steve Gibson on Sun, 2010-11-14 23:59Not quite sure how this comment fits into the middle of the thread about joining, but with the sales figures as they are there is no way, no matter how much you dislike it, that it is not a top 5. They definitely belong up there, measured on sales, images, contributors and any other metric I can think of - including photographer ire.
I have to side with you on the issues after F5, it's was all decidedly shaky with broken links, ophaned pages etc, and dodgy search for several days most of that is sorted now?
no website that big is ever perfect, especially in those dark corners. Poor interface? - well Controlled vocab often gets peoples back up because, well, yes it's tedious at first until you learn the way it works. (personally I didn't like the new search at all).
Joining
Steve Gibson on Wed, 2009-11-11 01:58Bad
Henri Faure (not verified) on Tue, 2009-11-17 13:04don't don't
Steve Gibson on Wed, 2009-11-18 02:47Exclusive Contributors
Alistair Shankie (not verified) on Sun, 2010-01-10 19:00Used to be good, now the pits!
Anonymous (not verified) on Wed, 2010-09-15 14:57iStock - not again, not ever...
Heater (not verified) on Tue, 2011-03-22 06:25istockphoto search is no
Alex (not verified) on Mon, 2011-04-04 22:18istock search
Steve Gibson on Fri, 2011-04-08 04:52I hear you alax, I've already been fairly vocal over the past few years about how the search at istock has been gradually whittled at until its become (as of 2011 for me) unusable. the results are indeed a mine-field of premium priced images that you can't sort by and istock have made it clear that there will be filtering/ordering features to allow sort by price. its a real shame, with all the keywords disambiguated the results should be excellent, and indeed are better than most if it were not for the various ill motived annoyances.
e.g. try a search between shutterstock and istock for "camera book" (i.e. a photo of a book and camera to emote learning or books about cameras etc) at time or writing on SS all you get is a page after page of books with not a photo with a camera in sight, istockphoto at least does show me a photo of a camera sitting on an open book - perfect!
It's only when you use search in earnest that you really see problems arise. Personally iI've stopped buying from IS long ago, SS is only acceptable if you are tied to that subscription otherwise it would be very temptng to go somewhere else, searching images is not easy
Istock files acceptance
Santhosh (not verified) on Sat, 2011-12-03 16:19istock change
Steve Gibson on Sun, 2011-12-04 22:28istock will change when they have to - but that's not guaranteed. This is only my opinion, but from external appearances istock seems partially paralyzed by what seems like an internal morass of 'big business'. They will either change or suffer some mortification at Getty's hands. No company is too large to fail and the larger they are and the less in touch with customers and contributors they get more likely that is. Once trust has been lost (for many that is already the case) then it's very hard to win back.
BUT... (isn't there always one) the large contributors with bargaining power to create bulk image submissions, bargain for higher royalties etc. can more than supply istock with 'most' of it's fresh image needs, meaning 'they can do this'.
It's interesting to hear this from a newbie(if you are?), most experienced microstockers, tho perhaps upset at times, look at their income from istock and, perhaps begrudgingly continue uploading; things are always changing and falling istock incomes might mean a revaluation for many. For me its the little things that annoy, a seemingly 'well controlled' amount of free speech in the istock forums (bans, locked threads etc) troubles me deeply - and would from any business.
Best Microstock sites
Pie (not verified) on Mon, 2012-04-16 14:02Vector Sites
Steve Gibson on Tue, 2012-04-17 00:36I'm not a vector illustrator so I'll highlight that first.
Theres a growing trend in crowdsourced content to have single marketplaces that sell all kinds of media (video, still and vector, and perhaps also audio, templates, 3d models, even scripts and code) so with that in mind think carefully about specialist vector-only sites and those larger agencies with an established client base who sell photos and also vectors - the later might be just as good if not better
I have a list of microstock agencies that sell vectors in vector format
also have a look at microstock blogs and sites - theres a couple that specialise in vectors/illustration.
Finally even if they don't accept vector illustrations have a look very seriously at shuterstock for selling rasterised versions of your work.
istock
Anonymous (not verified) on Thu, 2014-10-09 06:32change
Steve Gibson on Sat, 2014-10-11 00:59Over the past few years istock has transformed itself from the hardest but best selling place to sell your images (i.e. strict reviews) to opening the flood-gates to everything. I hear what you are saying about quality now, the istock collection is now peppered with bad photos; wrong, spammy or plain misleading descriptions and meta data - it was only 2 years ago that their collection was the best curated, tightly managed in the industry. i'd like to think that they have some secret-sauce technology that is working to protect buyers from the bad images through historic views, reputation and sales - but sadly I don't think that is the case.
This change (less than 18 months ago for the review quality) makes reading information about istock difficult, espeically when what should be quality references like books on the subject are now out of date. There are still references to 'istock' the leadng microstock site, shuttestock took on that role several years ago.