I honestly think the system setup on Fotolia is whacked...the categories are all over the place, and waaay too unorganized. I personally prefert the categories on BigStock, and Dreamstime - even Crestock had decent ones. SS also has an easy setup.

Do you guys agree with me on Fotolia's retarded categories? Maybe it's just me. It just seems like the system is very cumbersome, and the ability to only choose 2 categories, is weird. I'd like to meet the coder that created that system. :P

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Top Sellers ? Shutterstock ? Fotolia ? Dreamstime ? BigStock ? StockXpert ? FeaturePics ? MostPhotos ?

I don't use Fotolia, so I can't answer to that one.

In general, though I find the categories sort of restrictive - sometimes photos just don't fit into the categories that are listed and you end up stuffing it into "miscellaneous" or "isolated object", which when you look, have 5,000+ images - whose going to wade through all that?

I think having main categories and then subcategories is probably more helpful - like:

PEOPLE

-men
- bald
- bearded
- with mustaches
- with glasses
- clothed
- unclothed

-women
- long hair
- short hair
- with glasses
- clothed
- unclothed

-children
- girls
- boys
- groups
- more than one

-couples
- younger
- older

-seniors
- men
- women
- couples
- groups

-teens
- boys
- girls
- groups

-babies

-groups
- crowd scenes
- mixed

-families

I mean, how much easier would it be then for someone to find a picture of a bearded man or an elderly woman? Lots less to wade through than just a "people" gallery.

I suppose it limits the number of images a person sees, and sometimes they might grab another pic if they see something they can use while searching, but on the whole, I think I'd be happier looking through a more specific category than a wide, generic range.

Some people would find the category breakdown confusing, I guess, and coding it might be more of a nightmare - I don't know. I used to code html, but php is beyond me

Though I think most likely, that a larger number of people just search for an image by keyword - which works fine if the search engine is good AND if people aren't spamwording

Also, if a study were done and the sites are finding almost nobody searches by category, perhaps you could eliminate categories and allow submitters to create those "light boxes" or "user galleries" in case someone wanted to search groupings. The site search engine would have to be particularly good to do away with categories - at SS sometimes when you search for your own image using a keyword you know is there, it doesn't bring up the image; sometimes it doesn't bring up plurals either.

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Photography of Grace
Feature Pics
Photography Blography

They aren't the best as far as submitting. There is also another site that when you submit your keywords, and the system doesn't know what you mean, it will allow you to select or re-define the word. As an example, if you have a keyword of "kid" it will ask if you are talking about a child or a young goat.

My thoughts are that both Fotolia and the other site do this to overcome language barriers but that's just a guess.

At Fotolia, I think Chad has been made aware of the issue through their forum - they are usually responsive but (as much as I love the sales I get from the site) they are confusing in the way they run the site sometimes.

Fotolia - Its a tricky system, its tough to find what your looking for in terms of categories. Im sure alot are missing. What I do like is the fact it remembers old categories as most people submit similar images each time

(doesnt work with my random gallery!)

Dreamstime is my favourite system allthough Istocks new one is growing on me (i think its more accurate)

Doug