Some Eye Candy

In February 2007, I decided to give FeaturePics a try. I uploaded my entire portfolio (which then consisted of around 600-700 photos) and most were approved. Throughout the following 2 years, I didn’t have any sales. Then FeaturePics decided that their catalog was growing sufficiently that they could take the opportunity to weed out some of the less popular images.

They started recommending images be deleted. You didn’t have to delete them, but they strongly suggested it. They also stopped approving a lot of my images. They said the categories I was shooting in were too full.

I still didn’t have any sales as of February 24, 2010, so I decided it was time to leave the agency. I tried to delete the photos myself, but I could not, so I sent a request that my photos be deleted and my account closed, which they did.

on August 12, 2010 I decided maybe I would give them another shot. I figured in 6 months maybe they worked some of the kinks out of the system, and I have some newer photos that seem to be selling better on other sites, so I thought I might do a little better than I did before. So I opened a new contributor account, and uploaded 5 images, all of which were approved. A few days later I uploaded some more photos, and they were all rejected with 2 reasons:

I sent the following email to the Support Department looking for a reason for the 2 reasons:

It was true, I could not find anything on the site explaining an upload limit. I had never seen it before, and there was no documentation that said what the limit was, when it was over, how I could get it lifted, or that it even existed. Here is the first response I got from Elena (the owner of FeaturePics, and I believe the only person who actually works on the site):

To which I replied:

And got this reply:

Now I know that all these emails may get confusing to you, and believe me by now I was very confused with the situation, so I kept trying to get a straight answer, since she still hadn’t really explained to me why my images were declined because my old account was closed, nor had she explained what the upload limits were. So I asked:

And she replied:

Now at this point I was getting angry. Not only was she not answering my questions, but she was telling me my account was going to be deleted? Why? I really didn’t understand!

So finally I broke down and tried to get her to give me a real answer:

Her reply was:

So I replied with this:

To which I got no response.

Now at this point, I would like to apologize for
the endless emails I just forced you to read.
I was confused by them, and I am sure you will be confused
trying to read them on the page, but let’s get on with it.

So, I finally started to get it. Because I requested my account be closed in the past (and I am not going to lie, in my email requesting my account be closed I was rather irritated that I had been at the site for 3 years and not had a single sale, and I told her it was a waste of my time) I am now not allowed to have another account.
But rather than ban my account, she removed it, leaving me free to sign up with the same email address again, and have my images approved, only for her to realize after a few days that I was back and she wanted me gone.

So basically, at that point I gave up trying to get back into FeaturePics. Extremely shoddy business practices, as well as no sales means FeaturePics will not produce well for anyone, I fear. I was appalled with the responses I got from the Administrator of the site! You would think she would be a bit nicer, and certainly more professional! I would stay as far away from FeaturePics as I can if I were you, as you won’t likely have many sales, and if any problems come up, expect no support from the Admin.