I have occasionally volunteered my services as a PC thug. That’s PC as in “politically correct.” (Though it’s also true that I do my photo editing on a Lenovo and not a MacBook Pro. I have my reasons, but that’s another post.)

A couple of months ago, I got an error page while working on one of my main microstock sites, Dreamstime. Here’s a screenshot of the error message:

Here’s the letter I wrote to Dreamstime:

I’m sure it is unintentional, but the image that appears with your site’s 404 error strongly resembles the racist stereotype blackface characters seen in the ‘minstrel show’ genre. I suggest you remove the image and replace it with a less potentially offensive one.

Here’s the response I got:

Thank you for contacting Dreamstime. We are extremely sorry the image in question has been perceived as such. We have by no means intended to refer or point to minstrel shows. It is a comic image of a person that has been subject to an electric shock. The result of such contact with high voltage has often been comically depicted in raised hair and burnt skin.

Best regards,

Carmen Pietraru
Quality Assurance and Support

Here’s my follow-up letter, which I waited a good six weeks before sending:

Carmen,

I’ve noticed that the image in question is still in use. Are there any plans to change it? I would think out of sensitivity to your users that you would want to avoid even the perception that you were making use of an image that has, at best, echoes of a long-established history of racist imagery, however unintentional it may have been in this case. I would also think that in the millions of images hosted by Dreamstime, there would be plenty of appropriate images that would not have these problematic overtones.

I have shown it to friends who have had a similar concerns as mine. If there are no plans to remove it, I may share it with yet more friends and encourage them to share their opinion of this image with Dreamstime as well.

Peace,
Ryan Rodrick Beiler

I sent this last message in May,  haven’t received a response, and they’re still using the image (click here to see it in action), so I’m making good on my promise to Carmen and Dreamstime. I’m sharing this image with you so that you can share your opinion about it. So what do you think? Am I over-reacting to an innocent image and unintended offense? I’m not trying to be the know-it-all white guy who sees Bamboozled once and wants to impress everyone with my racial sensitivity.

But I am trying to be an ally.

If you think Dreamstime needs to find a new error image, here’s a link to their contact page. It’d be great if you could post copies of your message in the comments section of this post. I’m curious what other folks think. I like Dreamstime–it’s one of my best-performing microstock sites. I just want them to get a new error page image. When I complained about BigStock on this blog a while back, that got a response, so maybe this will.

So I was a little shocked when, within days of posting my “Secrets of Editorial Microstock—Revealed!” post, I was contacted by the PR firm representing BigStock, who wanted to dialogue about my criticisms of their site. I was surprised because my site doesn’t get a ton of traffic, which means that either a) My modest volume yet professional quality is finally getting noticed, or b) BigStock is getting its money’s worth out of their PR firm.

I welcomed their responses to my various complaints, and clarified some of my experience with their batch tool in my follow-up post, but here’s their point-by-point response to my original criticism. I have to say, I’m not that surprised by anything here. I complained that they reject images that sell great on Dreamstime and Shutterstock—they stand by their “high-quality” standards. I complained about slow review time—they say they’re making improvements. …. And so forth. My major complaint continues to be about sales. But now that they’re using TWITTER I’m sure the downloads will be skyrocketing.

Bigstock’s Image Selectivity:

Bigstock’s approval rate for images is on par with other top online stock photography sites.  Our image customers are seeking high-quality images on a large variety of topics and our goal is to service their needs on behalf of our contributors.  If there’s ever a question or concern about a specific image that hasn’t been accepted, or if there is a feeling that an error has been made, contributors can contact support with their concerns and we’ll provide guidance.

Review Time:

We typically approve images in one to three days . This can vary if we see a surge of upload activity within a specific week. We understand that short approval times are critical for editorial content.  We recently added additional reviewers as well as an additional review coordinator to shorten  the amount of time from upload to approval.

Uploading Process:

Bigstock’s new uploading tool retains most of the functionality of the old process while providing better batch tools and more flexible options for selecting images. We also added keyboard shortcuts, such as the ability to use the tab key to cycle through the entire metadata editing process. Our category suggestion tool was moved, but we’re seeking ways to consolidate. We’ve also launched a new “quick view” for upload and earnings data. While many contributors have told us that they are happy with these improvements, we do appreciate and respond to feedback sent to feedback@bigstockphoto.com.   Additional features are coming soon.

Sales:

We’ve made major investments in marketing and infrastructure to expand Bigstock’s global presence  We’re pleased to report that since March, we’ve launched a redesigned website; new online, e-mail and print ad campaigns; a redesigned newsletter; a trade show presence; regular Facebook and Twitter updates; as well as two new blogs, “The Upload” for contributors and “The Download” for image buyers.  We see ourselves as partners with our contributors and many exciting things are underway to support Bigstock’s growth.

Thanks for the opportunity to share our news and enhancements with you. Stay tuned for more updates to come.

I should begin posting running totals of sales like my buddy Laryn Kragt Bakker. His (far more impressive) stats tell the same tale–BigStock is in last place. I’m not trying to beat up on BigStock, but with limited time to process and upload, I’m starting to measure that time according to ROI. And right now, it’s just not worth it.

Some addenda to my recent post on microstock editorial intricacies. For starters, within days of that post, Shutterstock released a beta batch edit tool that absolutely rocks. A huge improvement over their older, much more linear process. I only wish they let you submit some pix but wait to edit others later, as Dreamstime and BigStock both do.

In the process, I also discovered that though I prefer BigStock’s previous batch tool, their  current one is about the same as Shutterstock’s new one (which make sense since Shutterstock owns Bigstock). It’s less intuitive (to me) than their previous one, which left all fields populated by your first choice, even if you selected more than one image, which made it easy to edit multiple images with the same basic info. Shutterstock’s tool is still superior because it at least populates matching fields when multiple images are selected (e.g. if the captions match), while BigStock’s just leaves all fields blank when multiple images are selected, and allows you to overwrite them. I like to have something to work with, rather than doing a lot of copy-and-paste, since I’m often uploading many images with same or similar captions—especially with editorial images—when the same caption applies to multiple images from the same event.

Also, as an experiment, I uploaded batches to the following sites one evening. Here are the results:

Dreamstime: Uploaded at 5pm – response by 5am the next morning (12 hrs)!

Shutterstock: Uploaded at 5:30 pm -  response by 8pm the following evening (27 hrs).

BigStock: Uploaded at 6pm – response two full days later (48 hrs).

I should also mention that earlier in the week I uploaded just two images to Shutterstock at 9am and got an approval response by 10am—1 hour response time! Wow!

My fundamental approach to microstock has been not to shoot for microstock’s sake, but to use microstock to compensate me for photos I was shooting anyway but may not have had a designated use for. There have been a few shoots I’ve done for purely mercenary purposes—photos of the Supreme Court and the U.S. Capitol, for example, that I might not have taken otherwise. But in general, this means that I have yet to ask any subject of any photo sign a model release that is required for any recognizable person for “royalty free” licensing most common on microstock sites.

Instead, I submit photos that contain recognizable people under “editorial” licenses, which are allegedly less marketable, but until I’m willing to stage smiling interactions between brightly lit businesspeople, I’m eschewing microstock’s most wanted images in favor of stuff I was interested in anyway. In DC, this has meant a lot of marches and rallies, which have sold at a steady trickle under editorial licenses.

However, each microstock site has its own idiosyncrasies when it comes to editorial photos, and you can save yourself a fair amount of frustration by mastering the various requirements of each site. At this point, I’m only aware of three major microstock sites that even accept editorial images: Dreamstime, Shutterstock, and BigStock. I have been submitting to all three for over a year. Here’s what I learned:

Shutterstock

Shutterstock requires a model release or editorial license for any “identifiable person.” In other words, if there’s a person in the shot, but they can’t be identified, it can be licensed as RF. There’s obviously some gray area there, but if it gets rejected, you can always resubmit as editorial. There’s also the requirement that any editorial shot be “newsworthy”—again, rather subjective, and apparently much of this can hinge on how you caption the photo. Here’s where Shutterstock is a little annoying, but I’ve gotten pretty good sales from them so it’s worth it. Click here to read their forum thread on editorial caption requirements. Here’s my summary:

• Follow the dateline format they require and then repeat the date in the caption itself. Yes, it eats up half of your 200 character limit on redundant information, but if you don’t, they’ll scold you and ask you to resubmit. Here’s their example: “JACKSON, NJ – JUNE 16: Singer Deborah Harry performs onstage at Six Flags Great Adventure June 16, 2008 in Jackson, NJ”
• Pictures don’t need to be recent to be newsworthy. If your image is not recent, reference a current or ongoing events, or throw in some fact or figure relating to the image that makes it relevant now and forever. For example, I’ve uploaded images from 2002 of Israeli soldiers in the Occupied West Bank.
  
• Shutterstock also requires name, age, and town/area of residence for any children. This is enforced unevenly, as some of my photos containing unidentified children have been approved, and the line between child/teen/adult is not completely clear. But I’m more likely to get ID info if there are kids involved. Here’s an example of when I did collect the info: “WASHINGTON, DC – MARCH 21: Daniel Rogel and son Daniel Rogel Jr. (4) of Silver Spring MD stand with some 200,000 immigrants’ rights activists on the National Mall on March 21, 2010 in Washington, DC.” 

Despite some of Shutterstock’s inconvenient requirements, they review editorial submissions super-fast, often within 24 hours, sometimes faster. They also seem to allow more latitude on quality issues like sharpness, camera noise, etc. for especially newsworthy shots. I was kind of shocked that they accepted many of my U2 concert photos that were shot with my point-and-shoot Canon Powershot.

Dreamstime

Dreamstime has hazy requirements similar to Shutterstock regarding “recognizable” people, but here’s an example of a rejection message:

The main subject of the image (or part of it) is one or several persons, model release documentation is required even if the face is not visible.

Their captioning requirements are much less strict than Shutterstock’s, but they do require that you include “editorial info” such as event-related links or links from news sites. That usually means a quick Google News search to find a recent article relating to the content of the photo—either directly, as in the case of the many protest rallies I’ve shot—or indirectly, such as finding an article about current events in the West Bank to go with photos I took there years ago. I just paste the URL in there and it works just fine.

Dreamstime has no ID requirements in their captions, so no need to get name/residence info for their sake, but if I’ve collected it anyway to submit to Shutterstock, I’ll include it in my Dreamstime caption. Their length limits are also more relaxed.

Dreamstime also allows you to send a “priority review” request through their “contact us” page, so that editorial images get reviewed much faster than RF images. Paste in all the image IDs for your breaking news editorial shots into the contact form and they’ll get reviewed pretty quick. There are even $5 bonuses for “In the News” images that they feature.

BigStock

I’ve stopped submitting any photos to BigStock for the following reasons: Picky, picky, picky. Slow, slow, slow. Cold, cold, cold (as in sales). They have consistently rejected photos approved by Shutterstock and Dreamstime, and despite such high standards sell very few of my photos that they do accept. They also take a very long time to review images, and there’s no way to request expedited review for breaking news events. So I got tired of having my photos rejected for bogus “out of focus” or “composition” reasons when those same images were accepted and making decent sales on other sites. It just wasn’t worth my time. For a while their only redeeming feature was a great batch caption/category/keyword submitting tool that was superior to every other microstock site. And then they redesigned their site. And despite the aesthetic improvement, the upload process is no longer as awesome. Oh well. They were acquired by Shutterstock a few months back, but other than the site redesign, I haven’t observed any difference in sales or general viability.

Others

It’s also worth noting that a few other microstock sites that don’t accept editorial images have fairly forgiving requirements for what constitutes a “recognizable” person. Both Fotolia and iStockphoto seem to be OK with people appearing in RF images, as long as their faces aren’t visible. For example, both Fotolia accepted this photo of a kayaker in Trondheim, Norway, even though I didn’t swim out and get a model release from him.

Maybe if I just got more industrious and started getting model releases, this would all be moot. But somehow I don’t thing these guys would cooperate…

As pledged at the end of last year, I have finally upgraded to a full-frame Nikon D700 in preparation for my three-year assignment in Palestine and Israel with Mennonite Central Committee (read that post for all of my excellent reasons for the purchase). I took it out for a test spin at church this last weekend, and was delighted that the Sunday school class was learning about planting seeds in good soil—both the biblical parable and literally planting vegetable seeds to plant in a garden plot next to our new church home on Hunt Place. Here’s my favorite pic that I’ve also submitted to Dreamstime and Shutterstock:

I’ve just recently been approved to submit photos to both iStockphoto and Veer. Though neither accept editorial submissions—which are my bread and butter—I have a fair collection of royalty free qualifying images that I can experiment with. I’m just getting started, so it’s hard to say if the sales will be worth it, but my motivation is spurred partly because they’re owned by Getty and Corbis, respectively, two major stock houses that one would assume would do a good job of supporting their microstock stepchildren.

First impressions: both are extremely picky compared to my top-selling sites Dreamstime and Shutterstock. It took a couple of rounds with each to get accepted as a contributor, and I’ve gotten a lot of rejections on the basis of “artifacting when viewed at full size”—sometimes on virtually noiseless photos taken at ISO 400 in broad daylight. Sometimes images from the same series seem to be somewhat arbitrarily accepted and rejected. Both are also hard core about “chromatic aberration”—something that can’t always be fixed in Lightroom. I sometimes feel like they’re trying to get me to buy better cameras and lenses.  But I’ll stick with them for a while to see if the sales make up for the hassle.

Other first impressions: iStock’s user interface and upload process is so stupid terrible that there seems to be  a host of third party software offerings to make it halfway reasonable. For example, on using their basic upload tool (they don’t offer FTP!) keywords and other IPTC data were not automatically imported, or imported only on a sporadic basis. User forums confirmed that this was a pervasive problem. Wow. I’ve been using the free software Deepmeta to manage my iStock uploads, and it works pretty well. Veer’s interface is considerably better—and quite elegant—but their batch processing is still pretty lousy compared to sites like BigStock (the best processing backend, in spite of lackluster sales).

BTW, my Fotolia sales are pretty crappy so far. I think the sites that accept editorial stock will always do better for me, but I figure the experiment with other sites is worth it, even if they only send a trickle of income my way.

After enjoying modest success on Dreamstime, Shutterstock, and BigStock microstock sites, I’m expanding a bit to Fotolia and hopefully iStockphoto. I waited on these latter two because they don’t have editorial options, and that’s been the bulk of my work. But now that I have a fair body of stuff that qualifies as royalty-free—my shots from Petra and Jerusalem are among my top sellers—so I’m ready to expand my horizons a bit. So far I’ve earned a whopping $1.20 on Fotolia in my first week! Woo-hoo!

iStockphoto sets a bit of a higher bar for applying. They make you take a quiz and then wait several days while they review three sample images. I applied last weekend and am still “pending approval.”

So far, I’m impressed with Fotolia’s relatively speedy approval process. We’ll see how their sales compare to the others. Dreamstime seems to be the slowest, but I’ve had my highest sales there…. Hopefully that doesn’t mean there’s an inverse proportion.