Microstock: Comments on Fotolia

This post has sat in my drafts long enough -- time to bang it out. Mostly, I'm just trying to outline my experiences with Fotolia and give a little bit of comparison with Dreamstime.

All my Fotolia related posts are here and my Dreamstime related posts are here.

The first big plus for Fotolia is speed of review. At Fotolia, review time is measured in hours, and at Dreamstime, it is measured in days (and honestly it feels like weeks). Typically Fotolia has my images reviewed within 8 business hours of when I submit them, although I submitted a batch this morning and they didn't get reviewed today (I expect them first thing tomorrow). BIG improvement!

One downside is the lack of an FTP upload... err, they have it, but I can't for the life of me figure out how to log in. And I'm a computer scientist! But, their flash uploader is very easy to use and fast, so no problem there.

Also, Fotolia initially rejected a few of my images (pretty much silently, actually). They require all images to be >= 4 MP unlike 3 MP at Dreamstime. Easily fixed by widening my crop slightly or in some cases just upsampling a little bit.

Keywording at Fotolia is a MUCH bigger hassle. For one thing, they accept multi-word keywords, which forced me to go back through all my images and re-keyword them (although I had to do it anyway because Bibble was lopping off parts of my longer lines). Along with that, it is just not a very convenient system, and once you submit an image for review, you can't change anything until it gets through review! Once you get used to the system it isn't as bad, but it still takes longer to finalize submissions.

The increased speed of review is a huge win though, since it really lets you keep a feeling of momentum. A day to wait isn't too bad... a week is horrendous.

Finally, there's lots of rumors flying around the web that Fotolia is overly picky compared to the other sites, and I've seen a little bit of that. I've had a few images rejected at Fotolia which I thought were definitely acceptable (and even sold one at Dreamstime!) but overall, it hasn't been as bad as I thought it would be.

Finally, one benefit of Fotolia is you can cash out at any time (with a $1 fee if under $50) instead of needing to wait until $100 at Dreamstime. Although, I tried checking it out at Fotolia and it gave me an error that I had less than $50... So maybe that's not as much of a benefit as I thought it was.

Overall, I like Fotolia -- not sure if I'd say I like it better than Dreamstime, although my portfolio on Fotolia is outselling my Dreamstime portfolio at a 3:2 ratio. I've sold three images at Fotolia... I'll let you do the math!

Microstock: First Dreamstime Sale!

I had my first sale at Dreamstime earlier this week -- the Stanford dish image above. It was the medium sized version too, meaning I got $1.36 for it!

Realistically, I'm really not making much money at this microstock thing. Even though I only have fifteen images up, two sales in a month isn't going to buy me anything other than a burger.

But, I've got a few plans before I give up on microstock, the primary plan is to actually shoot some images for microstock, instead of grabbing images from my portfolio.

BTW, the image above was one of those rejected at Fotolia.

Microstock: More Rejections

I had a few more rejects from Dreamstime (12 of 16 images approved, 4 images pending) which are listed on this page. Also, of 19 submissions to Fotolia, 11 were approved, which is about what I expected. Dreamstime is more lenient than Fotolia, at least from what I've heard. I'll post more about my recent experiences with Fotolia in the future -- the tentative title is called 'Fun with Keywording the Second Time'...

The light-painted cash shot that opens the post isn't too much of a surprise; microstock hates underexposure, especially if certain items (like the coins) aren't recognizable. I should have known better on that one. Oddly enough, Fotolia approved the image. Other low key images haven't done well, including the Angry Blender (didn't bother submitting it to Fotolia) and Jeju Sunrise (FT rejected, DT pending). On all these images I actually spent a lot of time playing with the image to improve contrast -- I tried doing an HDR-type process on Jeju Sunrise but the sand had a lot of artifacts so I put that off and submitted the low-key version.

My two bee images took a hit too on both sites, although I went in to the process knowing the detail wasn't quite there in both images. The second image I went back and forth on submitting it because the composition just didn't seem right (and that nasty shadow on the bee's back) but went ahead and submitted it anyway.

Both images were rejected from DT for poor lighting/contrast/exposure and subject too common or two specific. The better of the images (the first) made it through at Fotolia though and the second was rejected for quality of the photograph.

Really surprising with the rejection of both fuchsia shots at Fotolia for overabundant photo category. While they have a ton of fuchsia shots, one one is on black and it seems significantly different from my shots. Personally, I was a bit surprised the shots were accepted at Dreamstime because I blew some highlights and couldn't get them back. Oh well...

Even more surprising was Fotolia's rejection of my Green Stairway shot from Jeju. They said that:

The photographs in the Fotolia database are intended for sale as illustration of brochures, magazines, websites, and presentations. Your photographic work is excellent but does not meet the needs of the Fotolia customer base.

Sorry, but I disagree on that one. It's a solid image that has more merit than many of my other shots that were accepted!

Finally, Fotolia rejected three shots which included the Stanford dish (I don't have them elsewhere on the site, but they are pretty good -- I'll see if I can add them to this post tonight). They cited quality of the photograph, but I really don't see that. Those images were technically pretty good and I feel like they maybe rejected for another reason. Oh well, I'll see how they do at Dreamstime in a few days.

This post might seem like a big complaint about my rejections, but it is anything but. In 75% of cases, I agree with the rejections (and I feel that some of my shots should have been rejected but weren't). More importantly, I'm putting this stuff up to give anyone new to microstock an idea of what is declined, refused, and rejected.

The rejections don't bother me that much. At this point, I'm getting more worried about the commercial nature of my portfolio in general and the economics of it all. But that's another post altogether...

Microstock: First Refusal

Dreamstime gave me my first refusal today for the Angry Blender image above, stating:

• We have reviewed your file and this is not quite what we're looking for.
• Lack of composition. Please visit the Stock Photo Utilities section of our site or the message boards for more information on how to produce stock-oriented images.
• Poor lighting setup, poor contrast or incorrect exposure.
  

I've looked over the image again, and I have to admit -- I agree.

There isn't enough contrast in the face to draw the eye to it. Granted, this is one of my favorite images, but I need to dodge the "face" of the blender a bit more. But... I'm not going to bother, because let's face it -- it wouldn't do that well in stock anyway. Honestly... who could need an angry blender for their layout?

While it is a bummer to get an image rejected, I'm pretty surprised it hadn't happened yet (nine of ten images have passed). I'll take a 90% acceptance rate anytime.

P.S. Currently, the approval wait at Dreamstime is 5-6 days along with 1-2 days of wait for indexing into search. This means a wait of about a week from submission to images getting views. Don't expect to make money fast, that's for sure!

Microstock: Current Update

There's a number of things I want to comment on related to microstock, so I'll just lump them all into one post.

Currently I've got three images approved at Dreamstime (still 100% acceptance!) with 13 more pending. I've also got four more in various stages of keywording and editing that should be submitted tomorrow at the latest. I even decided against submitting two (pretty nice, IMHO) shots of Alcatraz after I realized there were near-identical shots already in the Dreamstime system.

Overall, I'd say I dread keywording the most since images tend to stay in the pre-keyworded stage longer than any other stage (except maybe the "add more blue to the sky" stage -- see tutorial here!). Overall, I probably spend more time editing submissions than I need to -- the users of the images likely edit them some too. But, it is nice to know that I'm building a folder of quality, edited images (including IPTC tags) that I can submit where ever I want.

That said, I've got three images active at Dreamstime with a combined 35 views and no sales. I'm beginning to suspect that my typical subjects (birds, nature, travel, etc.) and style (dark backgrounds if I do isolation) probably will not sell that well in microstock. But, by the time I go to the conference in France in less than two weeks, I'd like to have fifty images submitted, and I'm bound to make some sales with that many images live.

I'm still going to wait a bit before applying to the bigger agencies (IStock and Shutterstock) because they need portfolios to review and I want to see which of my images sell well. But, I was looking through Arcurs's two minute agency overview and I noticed his second place earner is Fotolia, which doesn't require an application process to submit images. So I think my next submission location, starting in a few days, will be Fotolia.

Actually, I should mention, the general buzz on Fotolia is quite inconsistent. People tend to be polarized about the site, either making lots of sales or very few at all. There's also rumors of nasty, quasi-identity theft, drivers license submission requirements and a much reduced acceptance rate. At this point though, I'm just going to give them a shot. After I get 20 images uploaded to Dreamstime, I'll take that twenty and submit them to Fotolia and see what happens.

And guess what? The first person to leave a comment with a Fotolia referral link (or a web page with your referral links) will get my Fotolia referral!

Just my way of rewarding one of my readers!

(I'm also curious to see how long it will take before someone actually offers me a link -- if it takes more than a day or two, I'll just go with Yuri Arcurs's link, as much as the Yuri Arcurs Distribution Network weirds me out!)

Microstock: First Image Approved!

I logged in to Dreamstime this morning and found that my first image was approved!

1 for 1, baby!

Of course, one view and no sales = no money yet.

My profile is here.

Update: Hmmm... If I search for my image, I can't find it. Maybe it takes a while to get indexed into their search? Or maybe the search engine doesn't show your own images? (no, because it also doesn't show up if I log out).

Update #2 (9/5): I just got this from Dreamstime:

"Congratulations, your image has been approved and will be available online soon. Please note that it may take up to 24-48 hours for the image to show up in all areas of the website."

That explains it -- it takes a little while for images to get into search. And, lo and behold, my image shows up in search now. It has four views so far, but not sure how many are mine.

Microstock: Update and Random Comments

Some my recent activities relating to MicroStock and ideas floating around in my grey matter:

• Approx 68 hours left until my first image is reviewed.
• The search function at Dreamstime is working for me again, and the word of the day is intimidating. Yes, I knew Dreamstime has a few million photos (currently 3,668,371 from 44,500 photographers) but until I actually started searching and see the competition, I didn't really comprehend what that means. To put it narrowly, a search for snowy egret yields 235 images. Some are worse than my image, but many are better; think about it -- how can you compete with over 200 other images?
• I'm not too convinced my egret image will be accepted... See above point.
• I received $5 in my account for linking Dreamstime. That was pretty easy money.
• Yesterday I spent over 10 hours tutoring and driving between sessions... on Labor Day. How'd most people's day off get to be my busiest day in over six months? But I made way more than I will make in microstock in the forseeable future.
  
• I've started searching through my archives for stock-worthy images. I've chosen out maybe 100 images so far (about half-way done) of which maybe 20-30 will be submitted. I'm really liking Bibble Pro for the job though -- tagging can be done within the program so I can save a lot of time (hypothetically, we'll see when I start uploading). The goal is to upload a bunch to Dreamstime, then the ones that succeed will be part of the pool I draw from to go through the multi-image application at other sites.
• I just bought a second SB-20 on eBay today for $25 (inc. shipping). It's no secret I think the SB-20 is the best used flash deal out there (see my review)!
• The motivation for the SB-20 was to allow me to try out Zach's white seamless tutorials... which has really inspired me and I think I can pull it off in my garage with not much trouble. But I need that second background light!

That's it for now!

Microstock: First Image Uploaded

I just uploaded my first image (the snowy egret). Mainly I chose it because it is one of my favorites and it seems pretty safe.

Dreamstime gave me this message back:

Current pending time: 127 hours

Great. I need to wait 5 days! I guess that's not too bad. This is also a bad time since it is over Labor Day weekend.

I'll try to carve out time to upload a few more, but uploading the image raised a lot of questions:

• I tried to search for egrets on Dreamstime to see what competition there was and it came up with no results. Then again, searching for 'business' gave me no results?!?! Obviously something is wrong with my searches right now.
  
• Can I do multi-word keywords? (that'd be a no... my keywords got shortened to autumn bird egret egretta fall snowy stream thula wading walking water white)
• What are all the extra options in the rights management area? Which should I be using?
• Can I tag the images in Bibble Pro to make my life easier?

Although, editing it, it wasn't quite as safe as I originally thought. The egret was actually only a small portion of the image, so my upload was right around the 3MP limit. The shot itself was a touch soft, but I don't know how important that is in a 3MP image.

Anyway, I need to move on to other stuff right now, but I plan to do a few more shots and get them queued up to see how things go.

Microstock: The Content Problem

My biggest concern with Microstock is microstock. Most sites prefer business people, happy families, etc. And I don't usually shoot those, especially on a white background (speaking of which, Zach Arias has an awesome white seamless tutorial which I plan to study soon).

Many of my shots are similar to the above shot of my daughter. BTW, this is a candid -- she was just sitting next to our bookshelves reading a book in a very cute pose. I only got one shot before she started hiding (sadly, both my kids are starting to hide from the camera more, even though I don't often recruit them for setup shots).

To really submit a lot of shots to microstock, I need to start shooting for microstock. Honestly, that just isn't going to happen with my current schedule (typical day last week: Get up at 7 am, head to the lab to work from 8 to 2:30ish, pick up the kids at school, hang out at home for an hour until my wife gets home, tutor student from 6-8 pm, etc. Not much time for shooting stock in there!) And, when I get home, I mostly just want to sit around, not set up photo shoots.

So, my biggest concern is how many of the shots in my archives are really suitable for microstock. My thinking is not that many, but I really just need to bite the bullet and submit a few and see what happens. I have a few in mind that will probably meet the requirements but I'm a bit concerned about the subject matter -- it just isn't that suitable for stock or not very unique.

For now, I'll just work on submitting a few to Dreamstime this weekend -- just to get started. The main requirements are 3+ MP (pretty easy), max quality JPG (they say highest JPG quality (12), but that seems relatively arbitrary), low noise, etc. After looking at their reasons for refusal page, I'm not too concerned, but they might be pretty picky.


On another subject, while I like the shot above, I don't think it's microstock worthy. For one thing, I haven't exactly talked to my wife about using my kids in stock shots. It's one thing if they get exposure on my blog, but it's another thing if one of my children's faces shows up on a book about serial killers. I'm sure it will be fine to use them if their faces aren't visible, but that limits my options greatly.

Also, the original (below) needed a lot of help just to get it to the state above, plus noise is quite high.

I don't know, what do you experienced people think? Will something like that get approved? What would the major flaws be?

Microstock: Dreamstime and Referrals

At Lorraine's suggestion, I'm going to start with Dreamstime since they don't have an approval process; you can just start submitting as soon as you register (but the images still need to be approved to go up). I've heard their acceptance policies are relatively tough though.

Of course, that bring up the question about what images to submit -- which is exactly what I've been dragging my feet on. I've got another post brewing on that subject...

Signing up for Dreamstime brings up another important thing to consider when entering microstock: referrals.

You'll notice if you put your mouse over any of the Dreamstime links that it has a little bit of text past the normal URL -- in my case, that extra text is my referral id, or res895237. This means, if you clicked on any of the links (and it was your first time to the site) it'd track me as the person that refers you. Then, if you signed up, I'd get some sort of reward (in terms of Dreamstime, that is 10% of purchases and 10% of sales). Dreamstime also gives you $5 for posting a referral ad (see mine on the right).

But, I'm not bringing this up to solicit everyone to click my links -- I have a larger point.


Microstock is all about making money -- referrals are another way to bring in cash -- and honestly, if you can drive a lot of traffic to sites, referrals can easily be worth more than image sales. Referrals cut across all areas of the internet -- eBay, Amazon, clothing stores, poker sites, etc. all have referral/affiliate programs. And as a photographer, you are silly if you give up this free money.

And it really is free money, by the way. If I had just gone straight to Dreamstime for my signup instead of using a referral code, the 10% of my sales that Lorraine will make would have just stayed with Dreamstime. So, before you sign up for any new site check for a referral program. If there is, figure out who you want to give the referral to and make sure they get it. The easiest way to do this is to clear your browser cookies (by clicking on Clear Private Data or a button like that in your Tools menu), then click on the link and sign up for the site. Most links will automatically tag the referral and you don't need to worry about it from there on out.

I tend to make it a point to give referrals to friends or people who have really helped me. It helps them out and costs me nothing, which is a win-win situation.

So congrats, Lorraine. Of course, no guarantees... 10% of $0 is still $0!