SXC and its usage
After a while I finally got some time to write something again. It took me a while to made this a readable post so please keep in mind that there are certainly some grammatical errors in it.
Okay, the reason for this post is my activity on sxc or Stock Exchange. As formerly stated you can find my profile at www.sxc.hu/pofile/xaio. However this is not a way to get me more comments or downloads, that’s really the reason of what follows.
To begin I just want to state for the record that sxc is a great website for beginning illustrators and photographers to show their pictures. The feedback is pretty good and all uploaded pictures get checked first by admins before they go online. So if one of your pictures make it online it means that they are good!
I only have my doubts with the restrictions you can add to your pictures. For example: I uploaded a picture with a restriction that asked for written permission before the user could download it. Of course downloads were not really getting of the charts. After a while I got a lot of dumb ass requests for pictures without any good reason. I didn’t want to answer and review them all so I changed the restriction to “the owner must be notified and credited when using the photo for any public work”. Of course downloading went through the roof, but I didn’t get any emails of people who downloaded it and wanted to use it for public / commercial use. I know the website counts every time a visitor views the picture at 100%, but It surely can’t be that none of those visitors used it for a project.
Where I’m getting at is the fact that the photographer can’t check if a visitor is using the picture for commercial purpose. I hear fairly common stories about photographers who see their work used in posters and stuff. Of course there’s nothing wrong with that, but why doesn’t the uploader get recognition for it. He’s the one that owns the copyright.
I’d love to see the sxc admins to find a quick and easy solution for this. However that’s probably harder then I and a lot of people with me are thinking.