The smiles and winks of creative individuals everywhere are joining today. From the silence of traditional ways to the revolution of Digital Media, the iStockphoto community, the judges and the Punctum Elder Council have spoken. The results are in for the 2008 Punctum Day Award winners. Happy Punctum Day everyone… and The Movement is On.

After careful counting, verifying and gauging gasps of awe, we announced the Punctum Day Awards finalists today.

The fate of the 10 finalists in each category: Photo, Vector, Video, Flash and Design, are now in the hands of the Punctum judges who will announce the winners on August 19.

Among the finalists artwork you'll find tennis players, yoga masters, basketball players, beauties, lots of beauties, muscly old men and plenty of punctum-worthy designs.

Thanks to thousands of you who voted for your favorite Punctum Day Awards. Check back for the winners on August 19.

Our partners at Payoneer have announced some scheduled downtime. As a result, iStockphoto will be disabling Payoneer payment requests at 5pm MST on Thursday, August 14, 2008.

During this time, iStock members will be unable to make a payment request with their Payoneer cards. Other payment requests will be unaffected.


Our accounting department will not process any Payoneer requests at anytime on Friday, August 15th. In addition, Payoneer card holders will be unable to check their account at the Payoneer site (which will be down).

Once their site is back up and running we will resume all the normal Payoneer features for you. In the meantime, thanks for your patience.


If you have any questions or concerns, please contact contributor relations.

Here's a nice set of procedures addressing the metadata issues brought up in the forums as of late.

Click here

The Qualifying Contest for our annual Steel Cage tournament is completed and our 32 Battle Royale contenders have been announced. See them all and their work here.

Over the last couple of weeks, the site has been performing well overall, but Search has not.

We have 48 search servers, and right now they are all maxed-out with queries. We're adding 20 more servers this afternoon, and although this will help, it will not bring the level of service our customers have come to expect.

We've been tweaking the system constantly since the issues started a few weeks ago, and have had some success. But more importantly, we've planned some more thorough back-end architecture changes which will be implemented over the next few weeks. We believe these larger changes will help rectify the issues. We understand that the current situation is certainly not optimal, but we're doing what we can as quickly as we can to make iStock a first-rate experience.

In the mean time, you may have been seeing a new error message, and we'd like to explain it.

Your search failed because our servers were too busy to fulfill your request. This sometimes happens with searches that are very broad or complex and return massive numbers of results. Try narrowing your search to something more specific, or using less 'or' modifiers. If the problem persists, please contact Support.

Normally queries take less than a second to complete on our search servers. If a query takes over 30 seconds, we know something is wrong, and we are set up to kill that query in order to maintain overall site performance. So you'll see that message above if your query times out. Please note that we've always killed these queries, but in the past we would just return zero results. That wasn't optimal either, but now that we're dealing with so many search time-outs, we're providing the more detailed message in order to clarify what's happening.

We are working as hard as we can to get everything running as quickly as possible: it's our top priority. Thank you for your patience during this period. We'll do our best to keep you updated.