Release Required?

Someone’s Got to Do It

Originally uploaded by Ian Fuller

I wonder if Shutterstock would require me to get a release from this police officer?

And is the text visible on the back of the van a copyright violation? I think it said “Kenwood” but you cannot see all of it.

Shutterstock Lessons

I’ve had a few days to think about Shutterstock rejecting 8 out of 10 of the photos I submitted in my first batch.

I searched WordPress for blogs mentioning Shutterstock and found this post about Shutterstock charging US taxes on photographers’ earnings. It reminds me how complex business is in the US – and how complex it is to do business with a US company. It’s one of the reasons I left for a simpler life here in Thailand.

I learned some lessons from the test submission I made. Maybe they’ll help other prospective submitters:

1. I did not do enough research about the kinds of images that Shutterstock consider marketable. I looked at Thailand and Bangkok pictures and thought they were rather boring. But maybe a better word is conventional. Stock photography isn’t a place to show off your creativity. They need high quality, non-controversial pictures.
2. I do not understand the ways that the pictures will be reproduced if purchased.  For example they said that the picture I submitted of the “phra” of a temple was not in focus. It looked fine on my laptop screen. But perhaps their customers need something that will print at A3 or larger. I didn’t check that. My camera are capable of producing high quality pictures, but I need to take more care than when I am printing for my own use at A4 or merely posting them online.
3. Not understanding the customers may be the source of my frustration about “copyright violations”. Two pictures were of Bangkok city buses – one new, the other old. One has a company’s logo but the old one doesn’t – although the colour scheme could be considered distinctive. I thought it would not be an issue for, perhaps, an article on Chinese buses competing in the export market or traffic accidents – but maybe I did not understand the issues. I feel that they are playing super-safe with this.
4. I was amazed that they rejected my panorama of the interior of Hua Lamphong Station because I did not have releases from all the people. If you enlarged it enough maybe the farmers in the Sa Kaeo Corn Harvesting picture could be “identifiable” but that seems questionable. Maybe Shutterstock set the bar high for new submitters and they are not usually that picky. I should search their site for crowd scenes and similar landscapes.
5. Shutterstock’s business model is to accept photos from anyone worldwide. I am sure they have far more submitters than they need. Therefore they do not have the resources or incentive to give every submitter personal attention. If I accept their model then I have to take care of myself.
6. Further to that, I am sure they get submitters who try to “game” their system and are an irritant. That may be why they put a 30-day hold on further submissions if you fail their ’7 out of 10′ test. In my case it is not reasonable. I am a bona fide photographer who put some thought into his 10 pictures. OK I did not choose correctly but that isn’t a crime.
7. What I should have done was submit 10 high-quality “safe” photos. One that Shutterstock accepted was a straightforward picture of a train – no people, no logos and absolutely no creative effects. If I had done 10 similar to that (not all trains) then I would be a happy submitter and maybe given a bit more freedom by Shutterstock.
8. The 30-day hold just puts me off – I feel like they’re treating me like a child. I’m not going to flood them immediately with loads of similar pictures that don’t meet their criteria.
9. There are many services similar to Shutterstock. This WordPress blogger has photos on six services. So it can be done.
10. I bet not many bloggers will be willing to post how much money they make. Let alone work out their revenue in terms of dollars per hour spent. I bet most amateur submitters make revenue that’s well below the US minimum wage for their work. But they do it to get some recognition and the money is secondary. I’m sure that drives real professionals crazy.

I have not decided it I will try again with Shutterstock. I have 28 days to prepare a new 10 picture portfolio. Since I have gone to the trouble of creating the account I could try my theory that a conservative first submission is the best route.

On the other hand I could get in a snit and take my photos elsewhere – maybe to a non-US service where it isn’t so complicated with tax issues and the like. Paying taxes on my earnings would be nice problem to have: currently I have zero earnings.

Overloading Lightroom

Last night I discovered how easy it is to overload the Lightroom database and cause it to malfunction and crash.

Here’s the story.

I had been adding location information to the IPTC fields of my pictures since I was using ACDSee. IPTC defines five location fields:

1. Location.
2. City.
3. Province.
4. Country.
5. ISO Country Code.

(It isn’t defined whether the fields define where a picture is taken, or what the picture is of. I use them for the “of” whereas the geocodes are always the “where”.)

Most of my pictures are taken in Bangkok. I adopted the convention that the location is the district (khet), the city is Bangkok, I left the province blank, the country is Thailand and the ISO Country Code is TH.

However, when I started using Jeff Friedl’s Geocoding plugin for Lightroom it uses a different convention. When Reverse Geocoding (filling in the IPTC location fields from a lookup to Google Earth using the Lat-Long) it generally leaves the Location blank, the City is the Khet, the Province is Bangkok and the Country is Thailand.

(Jeff has a challenge mapping the address information returned by Google into those fields. It can be different for each country. He does the best he can. I could argue with his choices based on my knowledge of living here but it isn’t worth it. I can live with his choices as long as my database is consistent.)

That left me with a big inconsistency in the Ligfhtroom database which made it hard to find, for example, all photos of khet Din Daeng where I live.

“No problem!”, I thought. I’ll do it Jeff’s way. I can select all photos with City = Bangkok and do an update so that State = Bangkok. That’s a good start. Then I can similarly move my Location (Khet) to the City.

Click for a larger image

The picture above shows the situation:

• 33,942 pictures in the database.
• 33,113 of them in Thailand.
• BUT 10.533 with State = Bangkok and,
• 18.756 with City = Bangkok.

It’s trivial in Lightroom to use filters to select all the photos with City = Bangkok. Then in Grid view (only) you can use the metadata panel on the right to edit the displayed fields for ALL the selected images.

However, what’s easy to do in the user interface is an immense task for the database engine.

First it has to accumulate all the metadata for the selected images and show it in the Metadata panel. Where all images have the same values it shows them. Where they differ it shows <mixed>. It also accumulates all the keywords (in my case hundreds of them) in the Keywording panel.

This takes a fair time even on a fast machine. The user must be patient while the display shows “Accumulating Metadata” in the top-left.

Once that’s complete, you can theoretically type new data in the Metadata panel and the changes will be applied instantly to all the selected pictures.

The key is “instantly”. Rule 1 – don’t change the City field first. The selection is City = Bangkok. If I change that the pictures immediately disappear from grid view as they no longer satisfy the Filter Criteria.

Lightroom wants to keep the display up to date at all times so that makes sense, but the user has to understand that when planning updates. Anything I type in any writable metadata affects all the selected pictures. That’s 18,756 database transactions initiated by a keystroke.

Since Lightroom doesn’t have a “commit” button for the Metadata it has to guess when the user has finished typing. That’s typically when she tabs out of a field or presses Return.

For my first attempt I selected all the 18.756 pictures with City = Bangkok. The State was blank and I typed ‘Bangkok’ in that field.

My fairly powerful PC ground to a halt with a frenzy of database activity. I knew what was happening so I didn’t disturb it.

Here’s the Windows Task Manager when Lightroom was busy:

Good that it is only using 52% of the CPU. I guess that means it was disk bound. But I was worrked that the Page File Usage was steadily increasing. “You’re going to run out of Virtual Memory!” I thought. And so it turned out…

After a few minutes (I didn’t time it) I got an error dialog box from Windows:

I love the delicate phrasing “has encountered a problem”. Why not tell it like it is – Lightroom has crashed!

Of course my heart sank. I thought I’d lost my database. I retarted Lightroom and it showed the message:

I am not sure what it meant by this. It didn’t ask me to restore from a backup. I think the word ‘restore’ must mean ‘recover’ – i.e. check all the internal database references and fixup the problems.

I wonder if the Lightroom database engine guarantees ACID properties for transactions, even in a single-user system?

Remember that as well as updating the database Lightroom also wants to update the original picture files with the new IPTC information. So with a few keystrokes I initiated the update of over 18,000 files – many of them big DNG files.

I don’t know how Lightroom handles those updates. Does it queue them? If it hasn’t finished before I shut down lightroom, is the queue persistent?

I found the only way to work was to select no more than 1,000 pictures at a time and change the Province and City. That’s two transactions for each picture – I can’t tell Lightroom to defer updating the database while I make two metadata changes.

They try to make it simple for the user and it works well for a few images. But the user can easily get herself into trouble as I did when working with thousands. It’s good that I did this update when I had only 18,000 pictures to change.

Note that before I did any of this I backed up my database, optimised it and even defragged my hard drive. I thought I may speed things up by closing the Keywording panel (so it didn’t have to accumulate al the keywords as I obviously wasn’t going to change them).

I even used Jeff Friedl’s Metadata Preset builder to build a Preset that only showed the location information. I thought that would save the database some more time compared with the verbose view I normally use.

Unfortunately that didn’t seem to make any difference to the performance. I think the user interface doesn’t simplify the query it sends to the database based on what’s being displayed in the Metadata panel. Too hard!

I finished my editing at 2:15 this morning. That included fixing a lot of other errors that I found in the location metadata and making a final backup. Everything seems fine with the database, but I am concerned because it has crashed and the recovery is only as good as the engineer who wrote that code.

So – the moral of the story is to be very careful with a powerful user interface like Lightroom. As a user you do have to think a bit about what you’re asking Lightroom to do when you make a change.

Nikon Coolpix P6000 GPS Accuracy

I’m normally very lazy about checking the accuracy of the geotags my camera puts into the images. Normally when I look the positions are very accurate.

Lightroom recognises pictures with geotags and provides a handy link to Google Maps so you can look for yourself.

However, sometimes it is way out. In the screenshot below I have thumbnails of two pictures that the camera geotagged automatically.

The thumbnail of the blue car is very accurately positioned. I was standing on the walkway between Asok Skytrain Station and Sukhumvit Subway Station.

However, the cream Land Rover is about 400m out. I took that picture a few minutes before standing on the walkway connecting Asok Skytrain Station to Exchange Tower. The GPS showed my position as outside the Asok Montri exit from the subway.

I’m sure the roof over the walkway affected the GPS accuracy. Nikon warn users about this in the camera’s manual:

GPS satellites may have a margin of error of several hundred metres depending on the positioning environment.

(Nikon Coolpix P6000 User’s Manual, English, page 62.)

I accept that. Central Bangkok is a very bad environment for a GPS receiver. What I would like to see is some warning in the recorded metadata that the fix may be innaccurate, or maybe better a margin of error. Plotting on a map like this gives users a spurious feeling of accuracy.

I wonder if there have been any court cases where GPS information was used to ‘prove’ that someone was or was not in a certain place at a certain time.

Of course it is also trivial to alter GPS data in the EXIF but unsophisticated judges or juries may not know this. Just like my ‘It’s on Auto!’ tourist – if the computer says so, it must be true.

Fake BMW

Fake BMW

Originally uploaded by Ian Fuller

On a lighter note – it’s amazing what cars I see when I am walking around Bangkok.

I saw this “BMW” outside a Chinese Temple on Charoen Krung Road in Chinatown. Someone grafted the front of a BMW 3-Series onto a sedan.

I posted it to the “Guess the Car …” group on Flickr. The reliable Hugo90 replied that the original vehicle was an old Toyota Corolla.

The owner must have had a twinge of conscience: there’s a Toyota badge on the bonnet.

I wonder if the owner made any mechanical modifications. The wheels look expensive but I am not an expert on such things.

Shutterstock – 2 Out of 10

Shutterstock reviewed the 10 pictures I uploaded last night very quickly. Unfortunately they only approved 2 out of 10. I feel chastened!

Here is the message they sent me:

Hi,

Thank you for your submission to Shutterstock.

In order for Shutterstock to maintain the high standard of our photography collection, new submitters must receive approval on at least seven (7) of their first ten (10) images to continue uploading. Unfortunately, while some of the images you submitted may meet our guidelines, we are unable to approve the requisite number and have temporarily disabled the uploading function on your account. This decision was based on concerns about quality, composition, lighting, or other features of your initial batch of images and we have listed the reasons below.

We invite you to resubmit in 30 days. In the meantime, you can still post banners, earn money from referring photographers, and participate in our forum discussions. Please do not create more than one account; doing so will result in permanent suspension.

Thank you for your interest in Shutterstock. We look forward to seeing you again in 30 days!

Regards,

Shutterstock Support

			Ian’s Comments
	Not Approved	Focus–Your image is not in focus or focus is not located where we feel it works best.	I’m surprised they think this is not in focus. It looks fine to me.
	Not Approved	Trademark–Contains potential trademark or copyright infringement–not editorial.	I’m surprised that a picture of a passing bus with the Metrobus logo would be considered copyright infringement. Good job I did not upload any of my Skytrain panoramas. They all contain copyrighted designs / logos.
	Not Approved	Trademark–Contains potential trademark or copyright infringement–not editorial.	Even more so for this picture – I cannot see anyone seeing a copyright infringement for a generic Bangkok bus.
	Not Approved	Model Release–Please re-upload with release.	I didn’t think the people were “identifiable” so it does not need a release. Of course it is impossible to get releases from a crowd. If I did obtain 200 releases how would I prove that I had releases for everyone pictured? That policy seems to preclude acceptance of any pictures with people in sans a release.
	Not Approved	7 of 10 must be approved	I guess they would have approved this one.
	Not Approved	Model Release–Please re-upload with release. Noise–Noise, film grain, over-sharpening, or artifacts at full size. Focus–Your image is not in focus or focus is not located where we feel it works best.	Similarly here I would not call the farmers “identifiable”. In included this one to see if they’d approve something with a different treatment. I think it is attractive – they think it isn’t marketable.
	Not Approved	7 of 10 must be approved	I guess they would have approved this one.
	Not Approved	Composition–Limited commercial value due to framing, cropping, and/or composition.	I don’t understand this comment. It looks well framed / cropped / composed to my eye. But they know what sells. I included this to see if a B&W picture would be approved. They don’t say anything about that so maybe it would.
	Not Approved	Composition–Limited commercial value due to framing, cropping, and/or composition.	Same as above. There is another truck in the background: maybe that is what they mean. I bet if I had included the close-ups I have with the Austin logo they would say it is potential copyright infringement.
	Not Approved	Focus–Your image is not in focus or focus is not located where we feel it works best.	I cannot see the focus problem here. My eyes must be getting old. I included this one to see if they like pet pictures. I was thinking they may have too many of them but it was worth a try.

First Shutterstock Submission

I made my first submission of 10 pictures to Shutterstock.

I thought of the sort of pictures that magazines etc. might want to buy and uploaded a selection of what I thought were good pictures.

I developed a new “workflow” in Lightroom for the purpose. Maybe I will post more about it later. In brief I made a new export preset for the pictures I wanted to submit that stripped all the metadata that Lightroom adds but keeps the camera info.

I made a new Lightroom catalog for Shutterstock and used that to put the pictures in the categories corresponding to the ones Shutterstock uses. I added suitable keywords (Shutterstock require a minimum of 7) and a short title to each picture.

I used Jeff Friedl’s “Megapixel Sort” plugin to check that all the pictures were above the 4MP minimum (after cropping) that Shutterstock now requires of new submitters like me.

Then I uploaded using their Java plugin. It does not sat Chrome is supported but it works. Yes, I had to download the Java runtime. More megabytes of overhead on my PC.

Shutterstock has you add metadata in their own editing screen. When you submit the batch it does a spell check. Of course it didn’t recognize Thai words like “Wat Burana” or “Hua Lamphong”. It didn’t recognize “b&w” and split it into two keywords “b” and “w”. I think that is a bug.

So once I persuaded the software that I spelled everything correctly they are now in a queue for review. I presume by a human.

Shutterstock gives you a 6-digit batch id. I added that as a non-exportable keyword in my Lightroom Shutterstock catalog.

I also have collections for Accepted and Rejected photos.

Now I am waiting eagerly to see if they will accept any of them. I have no idea really what they want and will sell. This is a learning experience.

The guidelines say that if they accept less than 7 pictures out of 10 I must wait a month before submitting more. So this is like a test.

One good thing – my license to Shutterstock is non-exclusive. I can sell the pictures elsewhere if I wish. Ha! Let’s sell one first and make a quarter!

Shutterstock Accepted Me!

They accepted me as a submitter without any queries. That is a relief.

I read the Submitter Guidelines. It looks like what I have to do is strip all metadata from the images I want to upload then I add keywords etc in their web interface.

I started a new Lightroom database to organize the pictures I submit.

Problem 1 – Lightroom does not let you have more than one catalog open at a time.

I will write more as I learn about the process.

Keywording and Tagging in Lightroom

The Name Game – Keywording and Tagging in Lightroom | x=blog+stay+informed.

Here’s one of the most comprehensive discussions I have seen. But Brandon’s requirements are completely different to mine so he has taken a different approach.

It’s good that the keyword / tag concept is so flexible that it can accomodate everybody’s needs. But without a plan you end up with a mass of keywords and aren’t much the wiser.

I’ll write more about my scheme in another post. It seems to be standing the test of time in that I can keyword my photos now without finding I have to change the design. Lightroom’s “keyword suggestions” seem psychic sometimes – but at others remarkably dumb.

Pingback?

I don;t understand all this blogging terminology. In my last post on Shutterstock I embedded a link to my first post on the subject.

When I published today’s installment I got a message in my WordPress Spam Queue. I don’t understand but it seems that WordPress was suspicuous of that link as if it was comment spam.

But I, the blog owner, published the post myself. Surely referencing other posts on the same subject is normal practice?

What is Pingback anyway? Sounds like a new term for somethign we’ve been doing ever since the web was invented. I think it is something to do with the fact that I referenced something in the WordPress domain.

Confusing.