March sales updates:

A variable month in March underpinned by one basic fact: Shutterstock sells! Month after month this agency just keeps performing well. I still have a few zero sales days there (usually weekends) but these have become the exception.

So, starting there, Shutterstock pulled in 108 downloads ($51.43) with $18.43 coming from the increasing number of On Demand sales.

Dreamstime produced 16 downloads ($10.92).

Istock bounced back from February with 17 downloads ($17.21) with a further $1.68 from 6 PP sales. Most of these were editorial images. My portfolio now stands at 443 but I must admit to not uploading in the last few weeks - the process is just so tedious that I need to take a break now and again. No other agency makes you upload images one by one and then makes you disambiguate virtually every keyword. Please -just give us batch upload, batch editing and let us put the keywords we want! There were hints some while back with talk of an easier "upload process" so I live in hope.

123rf dropped a bit in March with just 11 downloads ($5.51) which was dissapointing given their strong performance recently.

Bigstock also dissapointed with 4 downloads ($2.50) and just to make things worse the "bridge" connector from Shutterstock seems to have stopped working. I keep checking but none of my SS accepted images over the last couple of weeks have crossed over. Time to email support!

Fotalia produced one download (0.20 credits). I still need to push my back portfolio to them but the high rejection rate isn't much of an incentive.

Recent uploading saw me concentrating on my archive political images which I am still working through. I especially liked my images of Nina Temple, Secretary of the Democratic Left party (pictured) at their manifesto launch. This party (more of a campaign group in truth) grew out of the old Communist Party of Great Britain. She is holding up an issue of their New Times newspaper which clearly shows their opposition to the then Conservative government of John Major. A little slice of political history there. Regards, David.