Partner Program - titles & descriptions

I was just looking at my images over there and it looks like only the title shows up.  For many of my location images a lot of relevant info is in the description not the title something like "wenshu monastery" which really doesn't give enough info to the buyer like what country or province or what makes it interesting.  Will descriptions be migrated over?  If not should we change our titles to be more like descriptions?  And will changes made here be moved to images there automatically?


Separate issue, is there anything showing that we have the copyright all I see is "© 2011 Photos.com, a division of Getty Images.  All rights reserved." not my name or screen name?

(Edited on 2011-06-02 11:42:15 by traveler1116)

(Edited to make thread title more specific)

(Edited on 2011-06-02 12:05:57 by kelvinjay)

Will see what I can discover...

Not forgotten this... still waiting for an answer.

No. What you see on the Thinkstock & Photos.com file close up pages is all that will ever be sent from iStock.



You won't be able to submit an image with a title that is over 10 words, the system won't allow it. So make sure each word counts



No, the Thinkstock/Photos.com back-ends are not connected to iStock. The best analogy is that it's like you're e-mailing an image to someone. You'll both have an identical copy, but if you make changes after you've sent the image, those changes only happen to your copy. Once a file is on the partner sites, it lives there forever; the only changes iStock can make are to send requests to deactivate and reactivate specific images.



The partner sites have no specific information on you as a contributor because iStock is the one that holds the contract with them, not individual contributors. The name you are searching when you search for your content is called a 'credit line', but because you don't have a contract and registered copyright name with the partner sites, it's just held in the background as a piece of meta-data. This is why you end up with two different partner 'portfolios' if you change your iStock member name or account settings. The partner sites don't display any copyright information because they don't have any. Rather, they identify the source of all the content (iStockphoto) and point back to us where the copyright information is held.

I'm probably being thick, but doesn't that copyright information wrongly identify photos.com as the copyright owner ?

It says that on the bottom of every page of Photos.com, regardless of if you're looking at an image or not. It's not for the image, it's for the website itself.

ETA: iStock does it too if you scroll down to the bottom of all our pages, file close up pages included

(Edited on 2011-06-06 17:49:19 by asylumdown)

ah ok. I understand. Thanks for explaining.

Thanks for the detailed response.  Maybe something can be developed to let us edit our titles and keywords on the partner program in the future?

So does that mean the only workaround is to delete files from the partner sites, edit them here, and resubmit to the partner site?

No, when you opt the file out of the partner program, you're not 'deleting' it from the partner sites. After a file is transferred, the partner sites give it a new file ID (they use a different file numbering system) and send it to us. We then maintain the partner ID in the iStock database. When you opt a file out, the connector simply tells the partner sites to deactivate the corresponding partner ID on the partner sites. The image is still in their database (just like deactivated iStock files are still in our database), it's just not for sale. When you opt the file back in on iStock, the only thing the connector does is tell the partner sites to re-activate the corresponding partner file ID. It does not send any new data, just a re-activation request. So even if you've made changes on the iStock side, the image that gets re-activated on the partner sites will be the original copy that was sent.

Making your file titles more descriptive will only work for images that have not yet been sent to the partner sites.

The combination of this and the failure of some keywords to map accurately makes some files hard to find/correctly identify. A curious way to do business.

^Not just hard to find - some are absolutely impossible to find.


^^Might have been nice if all the title restrictions had been explained at the beginning of this partnership!!!!

All of these issues are being worked on right now. Transferring this amount of data from one isolated database to another with totally different rules, a different master CV, and different data management protocols in as fluid a manner as the opt-in features requires has required certain trade-offs that aren't exactly elegant. We're definitely aware that this situation isn't optimal, and we've learned a lot from this experience. This program will evolve, and it will get better.

I just tried to make a new title with the partner program in mind and found out that you can only put 10 words in.  Can you change the title specs to allow us to put 20 in there?