Hi everyone,

2020 is a really bad year.

If you have an account on istock and also on eyeem, then please check your email, including your spam folder.

I just received an email, that because I have duplicates between both accounts, my entire port of 2400 files in the eyeem/getty collection will be removed and the connection severed.

Relevant part:

� Getty Images has informed us that they will be deleting your portfolio within the EyeEm Getty collection. Getty have informed us that they will be removing high volume accounts with duplicate assets from the EyeEm Getty collection, where the contributor provides the content directly to Getty (via iStock), as well. As you are one of the comparably few EyeEm users who also holds an iStock account with a significant volume, you are also affected.�


Eyeem used to be exclusive, then switched to non exclusive content a few years ago.

So I now have a non exclusive contract with istock and a non exclusive contract with eyeem.

If you do a name search in Gettyimages, you cannot see any files from istock.

To now retroactively demand a kind of selective exclusivity is extremly weird, that is saying it politely.

Whenever eyeem became aware of the problem, they should have immediately warned all their artists. Who knows how many people after uploading to eyeem, gradually learned about the other agencies and in good faith, because the content is non exclusive, started to explore other agencies including istock.

Moreover, why, in 2020, is Gettyimages not able to recognize duplicates and automatically filter them out?

Why was eyeem not able to negotiate a delay in the current pandemic and crisis?  They know artists lost all income from their dayjobs.

Or at least a 90 notice before termination, or 60, 30?

Instead the admin suggested the artists should individually write to getty and istock to sort the problem out themselves and then report back to eyeem what they achieved.

So a few souls got into a ping pong loop, writing to istock who sent them to getty, who sent them back to eyeem...etc...for a single artist to deal with abhuge agency like getty is beyond intimidating. And many do not speak English.

Some artists asked to just have the duplicates removed, but apparently got no answer and their ports just disappeared quickly.

A few weeks ago, emails like that were already sent out. But an admin came in and reassured the community that this would only affect very,very few people and only ports that were nearly 100% identical.

At the time, artists asked if there was sime kind of guideline - after how many duplicates would they get �the letter�.  What percentage of duplicates. But they got no answer.

So, this...is the second round.

Imagine if at that stage they had written to all their artists to warn them that this problem might be coming their way.

If you look in the eyeem market facebook group

https://www.facebook.com/groups/EyeEmMarket/

You can read the whole story for yourself.

The most striking is a contributor who worked really hard and has 10 000 files on eyeem and 7000 in the eyeem/getty portfolio.

He has a very old istock account with 800 files and only a tiny number of duplicates. He also got the same letter that his files will be pulled in a few days. He writes he hasn�t uploaded to istock in ten years.

Somif even people with maybe less than 10% duplicates (and that would be all his file on istock, which he denies) have their ports deleted, then nobody is �safe�.

So if you prefer eyeem, maybe consider closing the istock account now.

But personally I explicitly requested to have my files pulled from getty.

I have not really uploaded to istock in years but it is full agency for all types of content and all kinds of styles.

I also have no idea what eyeem is going to do in the future. What if to tomorrow they sign a deal with a new agency X and I already have an account and my non exclusive content there?

There is absolutely no way for me to anticipate where eyeem is going.

They should have just stuck to exclusive content or made it clear in their contract that selective exclusivity is required if you want to have content in the partner program.

For years now, I have recommended eyeem left,right and center and to anyone that loves more artsy or quirky images.

But I will take a long break now and focus elsewhere.

Shutterstock and eyeem, two agencies that I always praised as drama free.

How quickly things change.

We can trust noone and must protect and help each other.

Stay safe,check your emails.

This was expected. I was always puzzled how eyeem pictures passed Getty's inspection when many of them are already in Getty's collections via Istock. It has never been a secret that many established microstock photographers are uploading to as many agencies as possible including Eyeem and Istock. But same goes for Alamy, for example, don't they send their files to Getty also. Eyeems business model will fall apart now. Their main source of income was Getty and they are in deep debt, recognized as a prospective start up, they took millions of euros to developthe business.
By the way, do you know why there are less and less those big Getty sales on through Eyeem? It was a part of this start up genius plan, to attract as many as possible contributors with large sales (they lost money intentionally ), and now the commissions are put back to real realistic ones.
Actually this project had no future, because they never had real contact with microstock contributors, they never bothered to get to know what microstock photographers want or need. They are those cool Berlin guys smoking weed, preferring cool outfits and bright offices (I dont blame them) But who are we, simple people producing these stupid stock pictures to talk to them.

Thanks for sharing this.

As a coincidence, I just dumped a few hundred of my images on Eyeem last week. A lot of them were accepted for the partner program meanwhile, and new acceptances keep rolling in. They seem to have a slow and intermittent review process, a lot of images are still under review too.

I still have an iStock portfolio, so some of them will be duplicates. Let's wait for the email to come in. 

Eyeem seems to have two markets: their own, and the partner program which is mainly the Eyeem collection on Getty.
I wonder if there are other serious partners involved too. The collection at Adobe Stock seems to be very limited, only two pages.

My main reason to join Eyeem was to see how their own market performs. I wonder what your experience is.
Personally, I'm less concerned about Getty, as (at least I assume) the royalties will be pennies anyhow, with Eyeem also taking their share.
If that's true I wouldn't mind that much them deleting my images from the Eyeem collection.

In the beginning the direct sales from their own marketplace, were slow, but increasing and also very good, the highest I ever got was 125 dollar, all the other sales were 10-30 dollars, sometimes more. They share 50% with the artist.

However, the last two years that has dropped a lot and I don�t think I had a marketplace sale in months,maybe even a year.

At the same time the money we get via getty dropped drastically. We still occasionally got some unsually high rewards, 30,60, 200 dollars, sometimes for very, very quirky files.

But the majority of my downloads was more in the range of 15 - 45 cents. A few even also below 10 cents. Other sales around a dollar.

Last month I had 53 sales and got 60 dollars. But only because of one larger sale for 35 dollars was the average around a dollar.

Which makes me wonder - if customers can so easily buy eyeem files for even below micro prices - why would anyone buy from eyeem.

That is why that whole argument that getty is trying to protect the higher price structure doesn�t make a lot of sense.

Over 80% of sales are clearly micro territory.

But you do get some really large sales inbetween which make up for the difference.

Personally I didn�t mind the mix, but many artists where surprised, they see the high list price and do not understand.

Eyeem also distributes to alamy and Adobe. Maybe also elsewhere, I don�t know.

But I think I only had one alamy sale and maybe two (?) Adobe sales in all,that time.

In the end, it just became a filler agency for Getty.

They really have some very nice content, very fresh and authentic. I think if they had kept everything exclusive and even made a special �best of� collection that they had kept on their own site, things would have been different.

On the other hand, I was always told, eyeem wants to do it differently, the community comes first, the agency thing is not important, they hate useful commercial content, want to focus on art...I think over time they realised that what customers like to buy is not necessarily the artsy content they were promoting.

And now reality has hit them hard.

Sadly it is the artists that will pay the price.

I really loved that place, but I must focus my attention elsewhere and maybe just share a few flowers and sunsets to stay in touch with the people from my network. Also only shoot from iphone, no post processing.

The flowers will be exclusive of course.

Robert Kneschke today asked in the eyeem market group - what about Adobe? Will the contributors face the same problem?

And an admin replied that no, with Adobe their agreement has a filtering system for duplicates.

Somebody else asked about alamy, so we will see.

But clearly all of this could have been avoided by keeping the content exclusive.

The admin Ramzi also mentioned, that eyeem is still in talks with getty, first of all to help those who lost both ports, to at least somehow to resurrect the istock account. He is very helpful and really reaches out.

They also seemed to have realized that it was affecting their repution if artists abruptly lose their income.

I suggested, if there was the option to just remove the duplicates, I would obviously prefer that. While my port never had 10 000 dollar lifestyle images, it was still my little port built over many years.

Apart from the money, to lose it hurts.

I have removed my recommendation for eyeem on the front page of my website.

Unless this issue is resolved and I can keep my account with just duplicates removed, I will not be uploading or recommending them in any way. I really need a break from eyeem, the frustration is proportional to my prior enthusiasm.

Especially the way they left the artists alone in dealing with Getty is very sarcastic. They did not even give them a specific contact partner, just deal �deal with them yourself, then report back to us�. I find that heartless and cold.

So are all files on iStock also on Getty?
Even if you ditch Eyeem files stay on Getty?

Does anybody know how to delete pictures from EyeEm? It looks like there is no point of being there anymore. Thank you in advance!

Ok but is every photo on istock transferred to Getty? Does that have anything to do with some check box thingy, something along the lines of "consider this photo for inclusion in Getty collection"?

You can deactivate any file from your port.

But are you sure?

Maybe just leave them there, focus on other places, come back 6 months later and read up on what happened.

I just wanted people to be aware of the potential problem.

I'm afraid that something similar could happen with Adobe.

I'm just now wondering if I should close Eyeem before it's too late, iStock is my biggest earner I wouldn't want to lose that over some stupid thing Eyeem did.

Quote from: qunamax on June 08, 2020, 21:02

Ok but is every photo on istock transferred to Getty? Does that have anything to do with some check box thingy, something along the lines of "consider this photo for inclusion in Getty collection"?

Istock is a part of Getty. Getty offer both collections to customers, the cheap one and the expensive one. It is silly to find same pictures in both of them. This was expected to happen. EyeEm screwed up big time, I think that Getty can even sue them.

Getty knew they were receiving content from a non exclusive collection. There is nothing to sue.

When the artists looks for their own content on gettyimages, they see only eyeem, nothing from istock.

When you do the same on istock, you only see istock content.

In both cases - you do not see duplicates.

So, since we have 2020, I doubt any artist would have even considered the possibility, that getty cannot filter images internally.

Also I am sure 99% of contributors have no clue that somewhere hidden deep inside getty also offers some select customers a way to look at all content, including istock.

The producers have two non exclusive contracts with two different companies. If both then have a distribution agreement further down the line with another party, the producers have really no way to know the details.

But same goes for Alamy, for example, don't they send their files to Getty also.

In general, no.
Looking on Getty, there are fewer than 160 pics on a search for Alamy: some seem to have a long list of credits (e.g.Credit: Name/Alamy Live News. (Photo by SameName/LightRocket via Getty Images), some are typos for Alamo, there is a person surnamed Alamy - and some I can't work out why they show up on a search for Alamy. 

Many Getty pics are mirrored on Alamy, however.

Quote from: qunamax on June 09, 2020, 05:12

I'm just now wondering if I should close Eyeem before it's too late, iStock is my biggest earner I wouldn't want to lose that over some stupid thing Eyeem did.

If I got it right, your images will be removed from the Eyeem collection at Getty, while your iStock portfolio stays intact. I would just leave it as it is, and meanwhile take the commissions coming in from Eyeem for as long as it lasts. Besides, after you remove your images from Eyeem it may take them weeks to delete them from Getty... if they ever do this.

That's ok if it goes like that, if in the end our accounts get closed at both agencies, with this thing happening over at SS, there's only Adobe left.
I know people here are not fond of istock, but it's always worked for me far better that SS.

fwiw, my port is gone at getty.

but i had two adobe sales and one marketplace sale on eyeem.

I will still upload non exclusive content to eyeem, maybe this will be a wake up call for eyeem to work harder on improving their own marketplace.

A lot of people are now worried that adobe might now do the same. At least there you can see duplicates, on getty duplication was completly invisible from outside.

I wish we could see to which partners our files have been transported.

But this non exclusive contract that can abruptly become exclusive retroactively is not a pleasant experience.