New Greasemonkey Lightbox Script

Buyers, there’s a new Greasemonkey script in town, and this one is right up your alley when it comes to ease of use of iStockphoto’s lightbox functionality.

Don’t Forget the “Seasonal Search”

Sometimes the iStockphoto search can seem a little bit daunting.  However, with the holiday season coming up, have no fear.  There are a set of pre-made searches that you can utilize to speed up your search tasks, or even just to brainstorm with.  The Seasonal Search page.

Where Are Those Display Options?

Sometime last week at iStockphoto, there was some sort of site outage, causing a bunch of strange things to occur here and there at the site.  One issue that has still not yet been fixed is the search return display options.  So, every time you get a search return, you have to reset it to show 200 images instead of 50, or turn back on image titles, etc.  In case you don’t recall how to set these options, here’s a reminder.

Designers, watch your sizes!

When you license an image from iStockphoto, you are agreeing to use a piece of content subject to the license terms and conditions listed on the content license page.  If you’ve never read the license agreement before, go ahead and take a look.  It’s not that bad, really – nothing at all like 64 pages of iTunes declarations.  The main parts to look at are the “Permitted License Uses” and the “Standard License Prohibitions”.   Lately, violations of one of these uses has come to light, and I wanted to take a moment to point out how to avoid this hazard – the 1280 x 800 image size requirement.

10 Free iStockphoto Credits

In the past, if you wanted to sign up for iStockphoto and get 10 free credits, you’d have to email me for a code and follow a long list of instructions.  Now, if you’d like to get the credits during sign up, you’ve just got three easy steps…

iStockphoto Adds Small Credit Pack

The way licensing content on iStockphoto works, is that you, the buyer, purchases a bundle of a certain number of credits, which you then essentially trade when you pick an image to download.  Various sizes of photos or different complexities of illustrations may cost more or less credits.

iStockphoto Adds Pricing Filter

Today, iStockphoto added a pricing filter to their advanced filtering options (found on the left side of the search results).  This was announced in the forums:

We’re releasing a new search filter today that will allow clients to sort results by price. By default search results will contain files from every price range. To narrow results, you can select preferred price ranges by adjusting the “Price Range” section on the left-hand side of the page in the search facet area.

Finding Your Images “Out There”

A lot of stock photo contributors are interested in finding their work “out there” being used.  For quite a while now, it’s been easy to use a website called TinEye to try and find a certain image being used on the internet.  In fact, back a while, I wrote about how buyers could use TinEye to brainstorm in their work process.  TinEye is kind of like a google search, but for images.  Well, yesterday, Google revealed their new product which is actually a Google search, but for images.  And it’s easy to use (and addicting).

New iStockphoto Search Filter

I’m not sure how long this has been there, but I just learned of it today, so I’m passing it on to you.  When you do a search for content on iStockphoto, in the left column are a bunch of attributes and filters you can use to modify the return results.  Well, way at the bottom, under “More Attributes” is the new (?) “Files From” filter:

iStockphoto Contributor Royalty Targets Announced

Last Friday at end of day, iStockphoto released the redeemed credit target numbers that contributors must surpass in 2011 to achieve a certain royalty percentage level for 2012.    After widespread reports of declining download numbers across the site, contributors were surprised to see the levels at the original numbers posted for last year, 2010.  Those numbers were modified at the end of 2010 to lower target levels.