@etudiante_rapide

Hey there! Nice to meet you

Yes, it's all individual regarding agencies except the obvious stuff (dpc at fotolia, istock doing an istock on itself, getty being getty etc...) People express their opinions and thoughts and others agree cause of the similar experiences with the matter in hand or they don't and then we talk to each other trying to get to the bottom of things.
I know that I never understood Istock to the core. Ever. No matter what I did, I was mediocre there (still am) compering myself to some of my friends with much, much more money and success (IS exclusives). But when I jumped the ship, a whole new world opened up to me. Sometimes scary and sometimes wonderful. It kinda showed me where I can end up. With low sales and me not working - dead end. I might as well stayed at IS and linger on. But when I start working and thinking about what I'm working on and why I'm working - sales start pouring in (well, not really but I had days like, 20 audio sales and 5 video sales on one agency at morning, and the other ones were just warming up for that day/week - that happened maybe twice and with not the exact numbers but it was a wind in my back. Earning a $700 for a day is a great deal for me. Also, earning $500 a month from all agencies is a big deal)
I got problems with some agencies and I feel free to express that problems publicly so I could show some week spots or mistakes I've made during the process of rebuilding my Istock earnings on other sites so someone could avoid them or someone could point out at some other stuff or just help with the those problems.
By all means, everything here is 100% truth and it's also only my opinion derived from two years of experience dealing with stuff that I was afraid to deal with in the beginning of this thread. I also think that there are many people asking the same questions I was asking myself when I was at IS. I hope I can help

I started with photos at IS in 2006, and it was a hilarious start, I can say Wasn't exclusive from the beginning but when footage kicked in, I was all IS. Had much more photos but deleted almost a half cause I divorced my wife back then and just didn't want to have those online (it was a great divorce and beautiful marriage, believe me, we just lost ourselves during the journey and continued as great friends) and that was a mistake cause few years later she told me something like "are you crazy, we all need that money, put those photos online again..." something like that. But I didn't. It wasn't fair to her even though she wanted them back online:)  And, those were my bestsellers   Trashed half of my video portfolio also... Anyways, enough personal chit chat. I was selling back then till 2008, everywhere. LuckyOliver, Featurepics, SS, Ft, Dt, Bs, IS, Inmagine, etc... It was ok, but video just blew all that out of the water. Money x4 in several months when I started contributing to IS. I stopped doing photos almost right away.

And audio... well, I love it. Went to Las Vegas on first AudioLypse. All expenses paid by IS. Made some great friendships and learned a lot. Got to know SJLocke there for some 15 minutes in some irish pub as I remember I asked him - how do you pronounce your name (that was a mystery for me when I had to say it out loud when I was talking to a living person, not writing on my comp), and I think I asked him something like - what's up with the IS forum attitude man? (he, as always, had some witty comment about everything and some people liked him and some liked him a bit less... Something like that. Can't remember.
Back OT. I was convinced that it will NEVER END. Me and ISaudio. But it did. Sadly.

And regarding curveballs, I don't know. crap happens. (sorry for the language). You just take it and that's it. Don't know what else to say about it

Look at me, writing miles again. Sorry for that. Just feeling good and I'm still sober
Hope this helps.

@mirkic

sending a hdd to alamy is no problem, just use a decent courier like UPS or EMS or DHL.

but the issue is they will consider the entire hdd as one single batch, so if for whatever reason their feel some of the images are not up to their QC standards they can reject the whole hdd !

another way is to send them a pack of CDs or DVDs, like 50 or 100 DVDs, in that case they told me each DVD will be accept as a single batch, so if rejection happens you won't lose everything, of course burning 100 dvd is going to take a sh-itload of time compared to hdd ...

they probably accept also memory cards, but that's not the point, the point is Alamy should seriously get their sh-it together, it's pointless to reject entire batches of 100K images because one of their underpaid QC guys in India feels so !