In this version ProStockMaster starts working with CanStockPhoto via our proprietary PSM API. Thus, from now on you will be able to track your sales and download stats on per-image base for any image uploaded to CSP with PSM.
All the data is transferred over HTTPS, which significantly improves the communication security.

Many thanks to Duncan Enman, CEO of CanStockPhoto and his great team for making this possible.

PSM gets a new Windows installer which works smoother on Vista and Windows 7 machines.
During the installation, the new installer will need administrative permissions (will ask for an admin password, if the user is not an administrator).
This solves this Vista issue.

In this release:

• iStock login fixed again.
• Statistics for 123rf & Fotolia fixed. Note that 123rf stats show up quite slow due to their server speed.
• Fixed: “99% upload – read timeout” error while uploading large files to Panthermedia.
• Removed some internal limitations from the free version.
• Mac: system / hidden folders will not show up in the file tree.
• Mac: some customers reported they could not run PSM 1.7 on their Macs, typically Leopard & Snow Leopard OS. This was caused by improper application packaging for Mac. Get v1.7.1 - it should run OK now.
• Linux releases & Linux support is discontinued from this release on. We prefer to focus on Mac and Win OS only.
• Shutterstock & Dreamstime FTP uploads: large / long batches interrupts fixed

...once again.
So v1.7 can not upload to iStock anymore. We'll fix it in upcoming 1.7.1 as well as a few statistics-related things.

Link: http://bit.ly/3eCREj

This is interesting: a new mid-format camera by an independent vendor. More than that, they say "every camera system is supported".

The price tag of 4985 € looks like a serious barrier for many prospective buyers. I guess the explanation for the high price is in Hartblei' FAQ:

Which camera systems are supported?
Very simple - ALL of them! Canon and Nikon mounts are on stock. But on a built to order base we can do about any other custom mount according to customers needs. We have all the mounts on stock and after order they are assembled to the lens. Further on a later date You can of course change your lenses mount, but for this you have to send in the lens to us for service.

They build the camera on demand, so you get a custom-made body. Probably that's why it costs a lot.
I am not sure where is their manufacturing though. Hartblei calls themselves "a German-Ukrainian company", "Munich-Kiev". I guess they utilize the facilities of the famous "Arsenal" factory located in Kiev, Ukraine. "Arsenal" is the manufacturer of all Russian/Ukrainian-made "Kiev" cameras since late 40-x. These cameras where typically copies of German-made IIWW-period models, and their quality and the quality of Arsenal-made optics widely varied.

When I first saw this announcement I was sure that the whole idea was to provide a medium camera body for existing 35mm lenses. This is a great idea. Many of us have a nice set of Canon/Nikon/Pentax/Minolta-Sony lenses and will be happy to go medium format with no additional investment in the pricey optics.
However, reviewing Hartblei offer I discovered that they also offer Carl Zeiss designed tilt shift lenses:
Hartblei - Macro 4/120 TS - Superrotator SR120M 3249 €
Hartblei - 4/40 IF TS IF - Superrotator SR40IF 4589 €
Hartblei - 2,8/80 TS - Superrotator SR80PL 1989 €

If I read it correctly, their prices are higher than for most Canon's TS. While I like the idea of a medium format body accepting 35 mm lenses, I am in doubt I will be willing to pay for these TS, even if they indeed provide 200 lpm resolution, like Hartblei site states.

Stock agency Pixamba adds a new users forum where members can share their thoughts.

I am happy to announce the release of new PSM v1.7.0!
In this version:

1.New stock agency added! Integrated upload, total stats and per-image statuses, downloads and earnings info for our new stock agency Pixamba. Expand your sales now!

2.iStock login fixed [again] due to further changes on their web.

3.Various EXIF interpretation fixes, ISO speed is now showing correctly in EXIF tab

I am a Canon guy and I always was. However, when Nikon comes with an in-camera projector creating up to 40" on-the-wall images & movies straight out of the camera, I applaud to Nikon engineers and their drive for innovation. Truly amazing idea and must be a state-of-the art technology, which packs all the great features in a pocket size P&S box.

Fixes iStock and Alamy login and hopefully makes Alamy bulk upload work

... and ProStockMaster v1.6.4 follows these changes. This release also fixes Alamy login, and, hopefully, also fixes the upload of multiple files to Alamy in a single batch.

The new version will be released on this weekend. If you see any weird problem after the auto-upgrade - re-install by downloading the full archive from our web.

It seems that once a three year we create the next thing, helping you to get some more sales online

Visit Pixamba web site and take a look what we did this time.
Build on an advanced cloud computing infrastructure, Pixamba is probably the world-fastest online stock photography agency today. Utilizing our technological advantage, we plan to add more features and media services soon.

We start with 255,000 midstock collection and we welcome microstock contributors.
At the moment the business model is credit-based and your commissions are $0.40/credit for any non-exclusive submission, which is effectively 40%-53% (depending on the credits package price) of the sale price.

Register now, take a tour and tell us what you think and how we can make things better and more convenient for you.

>>> July 27 2009 - UPDATE: Hurry, just a few days left! <<<

We have started in June 2006 and this month ProStockMaster celebrates 3 years online.
We invite you to celebrate with us and we are happy to offer you a special limited-time discount: 15% off for PRO license. Hurry, this offer ends on July 31.
Redeem coupon 3YEARS here

Did you know that if you do not work with Shutterstock in PSM you can use "Shutterstock FTP" credentials uploading to any FTP-enabled agency? Just keep in mind that what is shown as "Shutterstock" in PSM is in fact your trusted "ABC-stock" agency.

How to do that: go to "Upload->Stock Agencies->Shutterstock" and replace Shutterstock FTP server name with the name of the FTP server for "ABC-stock", adding your FTP credentials for "ABC-stock".

From now on, each time you upload to "Shutterstock" the file actually goes to "ABC-stock". Since Shutterstock keeps blocking their submitters login with the image captcha you can't see your Shutterstock stats in PSM anyway, so it can be used as a placeholder for any other FTP-enabled agency you prefer to work with.

If you did not see it yet somewhere else, worth watching:
a virtual tour in Yuri Arcurs studio, guided by Yuri.
Impressive.

New in this release:

1. Shutterstock uploads switched to FTP. Go to "Upload->Stock Agencies" to change your credentials.

The FTP server name is already filled in for you by the app. Your FTP user name is your email address, which is on file with Shutterstock and the password is your regular Shutterstock web site password.
Since the connection to Shutterstock is now via FTP only your stats for this site can not be displayed anymore.
Here is why...

2. “Export Metadata” dialog added in “File->Export Metadata” menu. It creates a CSV file with JPG IPTC metadata and a few more file parameters for all JPGs in a specified folder. Optionally, it works recursively on all the subfolders of the specified folder. You probably remember this free JPG IPTC metadata dump utility? Now it is an integral part of PSM, available for free with any license. Just open "File->Export Metadata" menu and select a folder to be exported.

3. Fixed an annoying bug causing thumbnails not to be displayed in many cases.
I am sure you faced it at least once - you start PSM, open a folder and there are no thumbnails, just the file names with '...' are displayed. Well, not anymore.
The app still needs some time to draw the thumbnails at the first access, but once the initial processing is done you get all the graphics instantly.

4. EXIF reading is back.
EXIF decided to leave PSM for a few weeks. Now it is back at its full.

5. Manage metadata – copying data between images: verified & OK. Also the dialog will close now when a user press OK in the “applied” confirmation message.

6. Alamy uploads: only one image can be uploaded. The issue is still there.
A quick check shows that the same is correct for Alamay uploads from their web either with their Java applet or with Alamy ActiveX control. Seems to be a problem with their web server. More info...

7. Minor fixes & updates for performance and graphics, here and there

Following Dreamstime, now Shutterstock adds captcha to submitter account login:

Server performance they say? Well, it is hard to believe that this is the real reason. I would say that this could be one of the possible reasons for doing that, but definitely not the primary one. Here is why.

Shutterstock is actually designed as two separated web sites, one is for the buyers (www.shutterstock.com) and another one (submit.shutterstock.com) is for the sellers (contributors). These sites seem to be connected mostly by their databases through the offline processes or by sharing the same databases.

Thus, there is no real overhead if a submitting software is accessing Shutterstock contributors' web site - the buyers web site is not affected at all, it's a separate resource.
Furthermore, if an automated software will use FTP (which can not be blocked by its nature) instead of HTTP, Shutterstock will get exactly the same traffic, but now over FTP. Shutterstock FTP servers will still have to handle the same amount of incoming bytes, meaning that they will have to consume more or less the same amount of resources like HTTP servers handling contributors uploads. No costs savings, no time saving, nada.

So, what exactly performance issue does this capture solve?
Look for a better reason and you will easily find it.

Anyway, at the moment PSM can not upload to Shutterstock due to this new interesting feature.
The next release of PSM is going to put Shutterstock uploads back on track.

We just have released a small and nice command line Java-based utility that can dump all your JPG IPTC metadata to a CSV file. It runs recursively for all the subfolders, collecting all JPGs there and writing their metadata in a CSV file.

The output looks this way

This JPG IPTC metadata to CSV utility is free to download and is free to use with no limitations. It is delivered to you as a part of ProStockMaster software according to PSM EULA. This utility requires an installed PSM v1.6.2 or later, with either free or commercial license. Free PSM installation is available here. The utility also requires pre-installed Java 5 or later. (Get latest Java here)

You can download the utility JAR file here

Windows Installation & Run
Installation
Put psm_metadump.jar file in the lib folder in ProStockMaster installation directory (Typically, "C:\Program Files\ProStockMaster")
The full path to JAR should be like "C:\Program Files\ProStockMaster\lib\psm_metadump.jar"

Running
It's a command line tool, so you open a cmd window, then type in:
cd prostockmaster-installation-directory
(i.e. typically you type: cd "C:\Program Files\ProStockMaster")

Next, run:
java -jar lib/psm_metadump.jar root-folder-for-your-JPGs

Example:
java -jar lib/psm_metadump.jar D:\\usr\\david\\img\\20D\\edited_full_size_jpg\\stock

Note that you have either to duplicate back slashes in the folder path, making \\ instead of \
or replace each \ by / (replace the backslash by the slash)

The utility produces a CSV file "psm_metadump.csv" in the current directory, i.e. in that "C:\Program Files\ProStockMaster" where you run it in the cmd window.
NOTE: the output file is overwritten each time!

Mac Installation & Run

Installation
CTRL+click on PSM 'java-cup' icon, whenever you have it installed, select Open Folder and put the downloaded psm_metadump.jar file in "Contents/Resources/Java/lib" folder. You should see all the rest of .jar files there, if they are not there you went to the wrong place.

Run
Open Terminal window and type in
cd psm-installation--folder/ProStockMaster.app/Contents/Resources/Java
where psm-installation--folder is where you put PSM (e.g. your Desktop folder path)

Next, run:
java -jar lib/psm_metadump.jar root-folder-for-your-JPGs

Example:
java -jar lib/psm_metadump.jar /usr/david/Desktop/images/stock

The utility produces a CSV file "psm_metadump.csv" in the current directory, i.e. in that "psm-installation--folder/ProStockMaster.app/Contents/Resources/Java where you run it in the Terminal window.
NOTE: the output file is overwritten each time!

More configurable params (all platforms)
1. You can specify different output file path by providing the second argument in the command line:
Example:
java -jar lib/psm_metadump.jar /usr/david/img/stock /temp/metadata.csv
in this case the output file will be "/temp/metadata.csv" (note again the double-backslashes)

2. You can replace the default columns delimiter ";" (semicolon) by any char you want, providing the third argument to the command line:
Example:
java -jar lib/psm_metadump.jar /usr/david/img/20D/edited_full_size_jpg/stock /temp/metadata.csv #
- here symbol "#" will be inserted as the columns delimiter in the output file. Make sure that your reading software can understand such CSV though.

Using "," (comma) as a columns delimiter is NOT recommended since this is the default keywords delimiter. Do not use comma until you want each keyword to be inserted in its own column (and I have no idea why you might want that)

3. When openning the CSV file make sure you have checked 'semicolon' and unchecked 'comma' check buttons in the export wizard:

Version 1.6.2 is a minor release which fixes Alamy uploads.

I guess most of you already saw this message when logged in to iStockphoto:

The iStock forums post by the same author says:

It's an interesting statement, where the first part is correct, while the second part is very confusing. No financial information to breach, oh yeah, really?

Just a week ago Dreamstime complained in this thread that "we had cases when contributors had their accounts accessed, password changed, payment requested". Now the iStockphoto guys are brave enough to say us they have "no financial information to breach"?

We all know that iStock, like any other stock photo agency has on file your PayPal / MoneyBookers accounts. They also collect funds that have to be transferred to contributors monthly. Should not this stuff be considered as a valuable financial information stored by iStock? And if it is not enough, add here you personal profile details like your home address, phones and your picture ID. And even your images portfolio is in danger since it can be first completely downloaded and stolen and then, just for fun, completely removed from the agency by a hacker who looks for an entertainment on the hacked site.

What happened to iStock on March 3 is not funny at all. And it is a much more serious issue than just a few hours of iStock down time, even if iStock prefers to present it this way. The site stores financial information and digital goods that can be stolen, so their "no financial info stored" statement is very far from the reality.

The point is that during the last few months I wrote to iStockphoto multiple emails pointing them on some security vulnerabilities in their system. The iStock answers always were "you don't have to worry, it is fine", whenever there was any answer at all.

The last email, which explains a serious security flaw in one of the iStockphoto technical interfaces was sent to iStock guys on March 2, 2009. Quite ironically, it was just a day before the site was attacked by the phishers. And quite typically, this email is still unanswered.

So I do worry. In my understanding, having security holes 'by design' is a very wrong approach to the software security concept, particularly for an online system where any security flaw can be explored and used by wise hackers. These people intentionally look for any vulnerability and once found, it will be sooner or later used against iStock customers. Perhaps we can not say at the moment how exactly some security flaw will be used to serve the hackers, but when we will know how it was used to compromise iStock security it obviously will be too late. Fixing the security flaws can not eliminate the next phishing attempt, but it definitely reduces the risk of a successful hacking attack.

This releases switches Dreamstime uploads to FTP and fixes a small issue which recently stopped Canstockphoto uploads. There is no change in your Canstock workflow, but for the Dreamstime uploads you have to add your FTP credentials now.
In order to do that, please login to Dreamstime web and go to
http://www.dreamstime.com/ftpupload.php
At the right part of the page you will see text similar to this:

When you open Dreamstime credentials dialog in PSM v1.6.1 ("Upload->Stock Agnecies" menu in PSM, click on the checkbutton next to Dreamstime name), the follow window opens:

Note that ProStockMaster already fills in for you the Dreamstime FTP server name and the correct server' FTP port, as well as takes care of entering Passive FTP mode when connected to Dreamstime FTP server. So the only two FTP parameters that you still have to provide are your FTP user ID from the Dreamstime web (see the image above) and your FTP password.
For Dreamstime, your FTP password is identical to your web password (please verify that your personal FTP details on Dreamstime web confirm that).

All you have to do to activate your FTP uploads to Dreamstime is copying your FTP user ID from Dreamstime web page directly to ProStockMaster GUI (you can use CTRL-C/CTRL-V keyboards sequences for bullet-proof Copy/Paste) and providing PSM with your FTP password (which seems to be the same like your web password).

You will still need to provide your web credentials in the top form of PSM GUI in order to get your Dreamstime statistics through PSM HTTP connection.

Let's see what else was added in v1.6.1.
This version sports 25 more languages in keywords translations, so together with previously introduced 23 most popular languages PSM is now capable of translating your keywords from 48 different languages.

In addition to the West European and North American languages set, we support now most East European languages (e.g. Hungarian, Slovak, Slovenian, Ukrainian) , accomplished by a nice selection of Asian languages like Turkish, Thai and Uzbek. We keep our target in mind: photographers should be able to describe their creations using their own words in their native language. We at ProStockMaster try to help them with this target, taking care of all the rest of the dirty and time consuming images keywording work.

Note, that ProStockMaster inserts your keywords directly into the IPTC segment of your image, thus never touching your pixels. Unfortunately, not all the applications available on the market today behave in the same way.

For instance, you use such a high-quality and high-performance tool like Adobe Photoshop to edit image' metadata each time opening your JPG, modifying keywords and closing the file back you can end up with the image of significantly lower quality than your original. Each time you use Photoshop to edit anything in your JPG Photoshop decompress JPG to be represented as bitmap RGB data. When you are done with your modifications and save a JPG file Photoshop re-compresses the data again and saves it as JPG file.

Thus, such a simple and intuitive Photoshop "Open a JPG -> add-metadata-with-File_Info -> Save JPG & Close" flow of operations becomes unsafe in terms of the image quality. Doing such modifications frequently on a certain file you can easily end up with visual artifacts and other image quality degradation results. If you want to stick with modifying your images metadata with Photoshop you better switch to the safe RAW-based workflow where no de/re-compression applies.

Alternatively, you can use ProStockMaster which even in it free version combines the convenience of multilingual translations, keywords suggestions and multi-agencies uploads for your stock photo images. All that without touching a single pixel of your valued artwork.