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.

For a couple of days people trying to upload images to Panthermedia got "PSM session error" error message and the upload stopped. This issue is fixed now and the upload is available again.

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

If you are trying to run ProStockMaster on a Vista machine and it fails to start it might be a simple Vista security-related issue, which can be fixed in seconds

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

How to fix:

1. Read the post below

2. Make sure you have restarted PSM after the auto upgrade

3. If this did not help, get and install the full archive.
Mac users: be sure to connect to your previous DB with your new PSM copy (more...)

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

Alamy uploads in PSM are capable to deliver 1 file only, all the rest of Alamy uploads is dropped by their server.
A small investigation shows that the same problem persists if you upload more than 1 file on Alamy web.
This way it looks with Alamy's ActiveX control (MS IE)

And this way it looks when using Alamy Java applet uploader (FireFox and others):

Not too much difference though. The connection is just fine and we can upload tons of images to to other agencies without any problem, so it seems to be a pure server issue at Alamy.
(Well, who else but Alamy uses Microsoft IIS? )
Once they'll fix their web-based multi-file uploads PSM batch uploads to Alamy should also start working again.

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.

1. Alamy: While v1.6.2 indeed brought back Alamy uploads, we found that there is still an issue there: only the first image in the batch is uploaded to Alamy. All the rest are not actually land in Alamy.

2. EXIF: EXIF data is not displayed in v1.6.2 due to the issue in Java binaries post-processing.

3. Metadata copying: we were reported that there is an issue with metadata copying between images through Manage Metadata window. We are checking this issue.

Some of these problems are external (Alamy changes) while some of them (#2,3) are caused by internal reasons - changes in our development environment and in the release packaging procedures.

We are going to fix this stuff in the upcoming PSM release.

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.

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.

Dreamstime adds a captcha to images uploads via HTTP, thus intentionally or unintentionally blocking PSM uploads.

The captcha adds a lot of work for regular web-based uploads since the contributors should now enter permanently changing captcha values for every new image they upload through Dreamstime web.

I sent an email to Dreamstime regarding this new feature and I hope this issue will be sorted out soon.
I will inform you how we proceed on this matter as soon as I get a new information.

I am happy to tell you that we and the Dreamstime management came to the mutual understanding regarding this issue. Dreamstime explained to the public that the recent web-based blocking was not intended to block ProStockMaster customers specifically, but was a general attempt to block any type of automatic software that unreasonably overloaded their servers.

Knowing that, we agreed that for the meantime ProStockMaster will switch to FTP uploads instead of HTTP uploading path. It also looks possible that the HTTP-based PSM service, which gives more control and more info for the Dreamstime customers than FTP uploads will come back later on, this time using some different tools / APIs. This is a subject to the availability of the development resources at Dreamstime and ProStockMaster.

I am happy to see that this issue is resolved in a goodwill. The software update follows.

We have just released a new Windows package with no embedded Java.
It is a much smaller download - just about 6 MB instead of 19 MB, and it works with your pre-installed Java.

You must have an installed Java on your machine in order to run PSM with this installation! If you are not sure if you got any Java, go to Windows "Start" menu, select "Run" and type in "cmd".
A DOS-style shell window opens. Type in

java -version

on the command prompt. If you get something like this

java version "1.6.0_12"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_12-b04)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 11.2-b01, mixed mode, sharing)

it means that you have some Java installed. It is highly recommended to upgrade your Java to the latest version using MS Windows Control Panel prior to starting the application. The minimum required JVM version is 1.5.12.

Since modern Java 6 on Windows is faster than the previous JVM version we bundle with PSM, with the new packaging and with the latest JVM ProStockMaster will run faster! Also, many GUI-related issues are fixed in Java 6, so various skins work faster and behave more stable in JVM 6.

The new PSM packaging also fixes some weird but relatively rare problems with Windows Vista 32-bit/64-bit pre-installed JVMs. If PSM refuses to start on your Windows machine with the bundled Java try this 'unbundled' installation package.

Note that ProStockMaster version did not change. It is the same v1.6.0 we have released last month.

If you wish to 'upgrade' your existing 1.6 installation with the new packaging, taking the advantage of faster PSM with your latest JVM just get the the setup file and install PSM in the same folder where the previous version resides.

Actually, it's a 'back to future' packaging since we have started the distribution this way. Then we switched to bundled JVM to avoid support issues related to improper Java installations and JVM functioning. Now we came back to that, bring you now both the 'bundled' and the 'unbundled' packages, so you can choose the package that works better for you.

Installation packages: Worldwide | North America

If you can login to Alamy web, but for some reason you can not login with the same user name and password into Alamy account through ProStockMaster application, take a look at the length of your password.

It seems that in the past Alamy allowed long passwords, but one day their developers decided that they do not want anything longer than 12 letters. So, what these guys did?
Instead of asking you to replace your old long password with some shorter characters sequence, Alamy web developers just decided to cut off your old long password to fit their new 12-letters standard, simple like that.

Do you think you log into Alamy web site with your old trusted "myAlamyVerySecurePassword"?
Wrong! Actually, you login there with just "myAlamyVeryS" - exactly the first 12 characters, while all the rest of the password is cut off on your login and ignored by Alamy.

That's why if you try "myAlamyVerySecurePassword" in ProStockMaster you are unable to login into your Alamy account. Instead, you should use just the first 12 characters of your long password. Well, at least until Alamy do anything about that.

We have moved to another hosting provider and we have changed the blogging platform to a more powerful engine. Unfortunately, the old and the new blogging platforms are incompatible, so we can not just Export posts from the old system and Import them into the new one.

Instead, we go post by post and re-create them in the new system. We'll not take the comments since it is a huge additional work, just the posts.

This work is in progress now, so visiting our blog you might see the most fresh post from e.g. Sep 2006.
It does not mean that it is the latest post indeed, it just means that this is the latest post till now that we have manually imported from the old blog.