So it's blatant promotion but who cares if you can win a nice shiny Cintiq Tablet!

To enter you need to live in US, UK, Canada, Germany and France, and all you have to do is fill out your details on their entry form. You can enter each day for more chances to win.

Shutterstock images are now available via an 'on demand' subscription (a package of downloads which can be used over the space of 1 year - pretty much the same as the pay-as-you go or buy credits systems offered by other agencies).

While its not a ground-breaking sales model I'm sure it will increase shutterstocks' sales. I'm certain that there were casual/individual designers who were put off by having to fork out $249 for a month long subscription, and for who the option of 25 daily downloads is too many.

StockXpert have caused a furore over the past week with changes they planned to make to their image sub licencing options, and despite the title of this post I'm sure they did not do it for the media attention!

There is nothing to panic about, after a lot of pressure from the microstocki contributor community they have modified their planned changes.

Picniche is a stock photo supply and demand analysis tool. It analyses the number of sales generated (demand) for a given keyword/s against the number of hits generated (supply) on several microstocki sites.

A recent post on flickr makes for interesting reading. It's long been anticipated that flickr would include some way for users to sell their images, and until now there has been lots of debate about how this might be implemented. Because flickr is photo sharing for the general public, it's less likely that photo editors / image users are going to want to wade through screen after screen of pictures of kids and pussy cats.

Some people go on holiday to get away from it all (and if that's you then perhaps the thought of getting up at the crack of dawn to get some great travel photos is not your idea of fun!). Even so there are still a few types of photo you can take while you are out and about travelling the world without spending too much of your relaxation time.

Shutterstock recently announced the acceptance of their 4 millionth microstocki image. They post themselves as the worlds largest microstock agency, and it would appear that their subscription system rather than 'cost per image' business plan is working better than ever.

To almost universal joy of most microstocki photographers dreamstime (read our review) have announced a new pricing stucture.

Someone got good value with this one from dreamstime...

photokeywords.com is an experimental tool which allows you to gather keyword info from a microstocki site. I have to say i'm not to sure I condone the harvesting of keywords like this, it's better than just cutting and pasting the keywords from another photo.. but not much!

istockphoto.com have launched their subscription service, you can visit their site for all the latest details. The big question is how will this affect sales and photographer incomes - hopefully, in some part, I've answered that here.

 (monthly costs)

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