New Keywording Service

It came to my attention by a comment from Mahroch to this other post that a new keywording service is available.

Here's the link: Find Photo Keywords

It works by allowing searches on Shutterstock, Fotolia and iStockPhoto, choosing similar images and then extracting the existing keywords on those images. You can then select the 50 that best apply to your image. (a bit like photokeywords.com that I referred on the other post).

The advantages of this new service are:

- Search in multiple sites
- Search in multiple languages (for Fotolia and iStock only)

The only thing I noticed that photokeywords allowed was to add new words after you made the final selection.

Hope you feel it's useful and thank you to Mahroch for the tip.

Crestock Best Image of the Day

It's not a great achievement but it made me happy nonetheless. One of my photos was nominated Best Image of the Day on Crestock.

StockXpert Steps Back

After what seemed a Submitters revolution, StockXpert decided to step back on their policy changes announced last week.

StockXpert had announced that subscription sales would stop being optional and that the site photos.com (a subsidiary of Jupiter Images) would also represent the full collection of StockXpert images.

The problem is photos.com EULA (User License Agreement) allows the use of subscription images for resale with products such as posters, mugs, pads, prints, etc, and this usually requires an Extended License on the microstock world.

A heated discussion took place on SXP forums and many people deleted their portfolios and many other suspended uploads to the site. The trust on SXP seems to be pretty shaken and only time will tell how this will end.

So, to avoid an exodus of submitters, StockXpert (or should we say Jupiter Images) had two choices. Give an opt-out to the program or modify the photos.com EULA not to allow resale products on subscription sales. I (and I believe most submitters) would obviously prefer the EULA revision. They've decided to give everyone an opt-out.

Many people have voiced their concerns and announced they will opt-out on subscription sales on SXP. Some are going for the wait and see approach and will stay opt-in and see how things go.

It's the second time this year (after the Fotolia subscription plan announcement) that submitters have joined and forced an agency to review their offers. This would never be possible if we, as submitters, were commited to only one agency (on an exclusive plan) or if there weren't at least 5 or 6 solid sites to submit to. For now, the strenght seems to be on our side... Let's wait and see what the future holds.

Shutterstock On Demand

ShutterStock announced yesterday two new products in their subscription plans. They've called it Shutterstock on Demand and it's basically a credit package that a client can use for a year, instead of having a limit of photos to download per day.

There are two packages, one for small/medium images and other for full size images.

The measure seems to be very welcome by the microstock community and finally puts ShutterStock on par with it's competitors in terms of buying solutions.

The comissions will be higher than the usual subscription sales. As in the normal subscription plan (now called "25 a day") the comission will vary with the submitter's total earnings (lifetime) in Shutterstock. Here's a table with the values:

Small/Medium Package
< $500 in earnings - $0.81
> $500 and < $3000 - $1.07
> $3000 and < $10000 - $1.17
> $10000 - $1.24

Any Size Package
< $500 in earnings - $1.88
> $500 and < $3000 - $2.48
> $3000 and < $10000 - $2.70
> $10000 - $2.85

The referral earnings and cd backup program comissions stay the same, with $0.03 and $0.05 respectively.

Kudos for Shutterstock for allowing these new options to buyers.

Oh, Paris!

I've just come back from a small trip to Paris. To my surprise, I found one of my images in use as part of a poster of "Fête des Tuileries" spread all over the city. Just for fun, here it is:



And here's a link to the image used