Getty Images and most stock websites

kmlc

kmlc

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Katy
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Afternoon fellow addicts

I was wondering, as you do, whether anyone hear is a registered contributor to Getty Images?
Or any other commercial stock image company?

The reason for my question being, i am interested in seeing if my work is good enough, but not before i know of any bad stories etc etc of them ripping you off, not paying you blah blah.

:) Ever the optimist, Kate xx :bonk:
 
No personal experience, but I was chatting to a guy yesterday who makes all his income from stock photography. He uses 3 in total, Alamy plus two specialist wildlife stock sites. Getty and Corbis are both huge, although you get a lower percentage of sale profits if you can get in then it's almost certainly worthwhile.

However, dont be tempted to place stock with any of the companies that require you to pay anything upfront - if they're a good enough company they'll be more than happy with what they make in commission.
 
I've registered to www.istockphoto.com so would also be interested in responses. Not managed to get anything online with them yet though.

Fotolia et al are all a bit of a joke IMHO, they pay 57p a shot and I've sold 4 [out of 4 test shots uploaded] in 2 years yet they only show me having credit for one sale.
 
Some microstock sites are a waste of time (for me), others are good. I think Fotolia is great and with the recent addition of new sizes which acts as a price increase I had my best month ever there last month.

If you only upload 4 or 10 or even 100 images it is possible that they may be just a little lost amongst the three and a quarter million others currently on there? I feel you are rubbishing something without giving it a fair trial.

Nor do they pay 57p per shot - the lowest is just over a third of this for the smallest size for members with less than 100 sales. Sounds low and it is BUT if you upload your images exclusively there, you get 50% at the lowest ranking (less than 100 sales) of each sale instead of 33% and images start at one credit (57 pence) and go up to five credits if you have a 400D - they depend on size. They use credits because of the different currencies.

Once you have sold 100 images you can charge 2 credits for your exclusive images and Silver (1000 sales) three credits and your percentages also go up. Therefore for instance I can sell images from my camera for between 3 and 15 credits. A large size image for 12 credits (12 x 57p) and I get 54% of this - soon mounts up when you sell enough of them

I would need to do a lot more work to make a living at microstock but it pays for my equipment and gives me a good excuse to keep filling up hard drives with images - link to my FT portfolio* if you are interested and there is a lot more information on the site which will probably make more sense than I have done :)



Christine

*Had better mention I am a volunteer moderator in their forum, not employed by them and only get the same revenues as any other submitters - just in case anyone thinks it strange to see my name all over the forum there
 
Kerioak said:
If you only upload 4 or 10 or even 100 images it is possible that they may be just a little lost amongst the three and a quarter million others currently on there? I feel you are rubbishing something without giving it a fair trial.
Click to expand...

I actually uploaded a dozen images, spent around 2 hours prepping them with keywords and tags etc to test the upload and submission system. Now 66% of them got dismissed out of hand with an arbitary mail stating a dozen reasons without narrowing it down. It also took over 10 days to have them accepted / rejected. A colleague also tried the same test and to date he still hasn't had some images in his 'queue' accepted / rejected months on. The ones that were took the 10-14 day mark too.

I am not 'rubbishing something without giving it a fair trial' but simply saying I don't think for the additional time and effort required they are a reasonable avenue for additional funding.

Put simply I found them to be abysmal but others experiences may differ.
 
If your friend is still waiting then contact support there - the review time is currently between a few hours and a few days. They sometimes increase during holiday periods. If images are declined then you are free to post the thumbnails in the relevant section of the forum for others to review - stock photography is an art in itself, artistic it is not in most cases and sometimes takes a while to get the hang of :)

Good luck with Istock !

Christine
 
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