Ricoh Mirai User Club

People know this already. Wonderful news people with 100 downloads a month will get a massive 20% commission in February and may get to level 3 by June. More wonderful news, I average about 250 downloads a month so could reach level 5 after 10 months before being returned to Level 1 a couple of months later. Great. And even people on Level 6 will get mountains of 10 cent sales. Serious question: Are you paid to troll the forum and twitter? Or are you just trying to promote whatever nonsense comes up when people click the irrelevant link you provide. Is a a virus? A Rickrolling link? Or perhaps something more unsavory than Rick Astley?

When I saw these I thought you’d deliberately uploaded awful photos to demonstrate what a photo worth under 10 cents looks like, but no, they belong to Jose the troll clown shill.

Please be quiet and take your inane narcissistic clown act somewhere else.

The contributor’s whole portfolio might be stolen, I only clicked on one other photo, the strawberries, and it appears to have been taken from another Shutterstock user. Image theft, which already existed on Shutterstock, is likely to get increasingly serious now that legitimate users are moving their focus to other sites. Perhaps someone with Twitter etc. could tweet about this.

After 3 and a half years of uploading, I’ve got within $200 of reaching the $3000 threshold to move up to 36c per sub, and instead of that I’ve got potentially 10c per sub to look forward to. Unbelievable. And in the middle of a scary pandemic. Seriously messed up stuff. Really no point in creating good useful images for 10c. While I admire the people who are planning to delete and disable their Shutterstock portfolios, I won’t be joining them just yet, but I am unlikely to be adding many images to my portfolio and will be concentrating more on uploading to other sites and looking at other ways to sell my photos. Hopefully, Abode will start accepting regular Editorial images.

Potential buyers would be able to see it and the people who read articles these buyers chose to attach it to. I thought selling photos and was the main purpose of Shutterstock. What does people keeping their port privates on the forum have to do with honesty? I am also going to excuse myself from ANY further participation in the forum, at least until a new Jeff is appointed. Sayonara.

Honesty and accuracy might not matter to you, but they matter to most people and they almost certainly matter to the people who pay for our photos. You’re one of the people who constantly whine about and criticize reviewers for rejecting your photos, yet you think it’s fine that contributors lie and behave irresponsibly. Shutterstock rules require descriptions to be accurate - that includes locations and dates. If you can’t grasp that simple concept then perhaps you should be limit yourself to submitting photos of flowers. And Fukuoka is not Fukushima. Just as Chicago isn’t Los Angeles, Sydney isn’t Perth, and Tel Aviv is not Jerusalem.

It was taken in Fukuoka, it’s a famous street. Other photos labelled as Tokyo 2020 by the same contributor were also taken in Fukuoka. Just because it was uploaded recently doesn’t mean it was taken recently. By weird coincidence (?!) the contributor has photos uploaded a while ago described as being taken in Fukuoka in 2019. Presumably, you’d have no problem if I upload a photo taken in a bar in Hong Kong three years ago and describe it as it a photo of local people enjoying a beer in Wuhan during the coronavirus pandemic in January 2020. Honesty matters.

Congratulations, 37 a day is pretty good, I average just 9 a day at the moment, down from 15 earlier this year, but to be honest I’m happy to get daily sales at the moment even if they are small.

So you think it’s OK to ignore Shutterstock’s rules on accuracy and lie in descriptions. If I go to Canada and take photos in Charlottetown, do you think it would be acceptable for me to claim they were taken in Quebec or Montreal because to the average user Canada is associated with these cities not Charlottetown? Moreover, as I stated before, the date on the Fukuoka also appears inaccurate.

I think that’s a bit of an exaggeration: some images are selling at the moment, both new and old. The big change seems to be an increase in the proportion of subs, but still lots of subs and a handful of ODs is better than nothing. The time to upload depends on numerous factors like the subject of the photo, how similar they are to each other etc.

Shutterstock has also written ‘guidelines’ about keywords being accurate and truthful: ”Creating Keywords Since editorial images are used to illustrate newsworthy events and subjects of human interest, it is important that keywords for these images be accurate and truthful. Never add keywords that could be misleading. For example, if an editorial image features a product manufactured by Magnavox, do not use pair the keyword “Sony” with the image.” If people are submitting photos as editorial with the expectation of the photos being used by media outlets and being paid then they are acting as a photojournalist, regardless of whether they’re paid 33c or $333, and should act with integrity in respect of both descriptions and keywords.

I think it would be better to just save time and hassle and just send in an unadulterated photo as an honest and perfectly legal Illustrative Editorial.

I’d also give someone the benefit of the doubt if it was just the one photo AND if there had some actual photos of Tokyo in their portfolio. But there don’t appear to be any and they just seem to have looked for old photos of people wearing face masks to change the date and place. It might not be important but it is really dishonest and not something to be proud of, if you can’t be bothered to look up the date, why go to the trouble to upload it.

I’d avoid it. If the title is accurate then you’re not being dishonest, using keywords like ‘coronavirus’ wouldn’t be dishonest, but it would basically be spamming in most cases and possibly just wasting buyers’ time. There’s already too much coronavirus spam about. One chancer, and I’m sure there’s more, has even changed the locations, and almost certainly the dates, of photos to fit the coronavirus narrative. Tokyo. Japan. Asia. 02/11/2020. Citizens in the city in the time of the Corona virus. (https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/tokyo-japan-asia-02112020-citizens-city-1701000343) This picture and others by the same person are not Tokyo, they’re Fukuoka, and they’re probably not 2020. I suspect Shutterstock doesn’t care.