well i am awaiting to leave dreamstime exclusivity and am looking at getting all/as many of my pictures accepted onto ss, they seem to be really picky when it comes to everything and had 56/154 accepted, a few were down to focus issues which i thought was crazy as i have reviewed them up at 100% and find them really sharp.

Anyway i hear a few people on here resize photos to avoid this so what kind of dimensions are we talking?

everything i shoot is on a 5d mk2 so the image size is currently at 5616 x 3744, what would you resize them to?

If you go to 2500 on the smallest side that would still leave you at slightly over 9 Mpx and might be enough to get past the inspectors.  I'd try a few at different sizes to see what works.  If I have one with problems but still salvageable I sometimes go to 2000 on the smallest side minimum leaving it at 6 Mpx, but that's starting at 18.  If you have to go smaller than 6 Mpx then forget it and just move on to the next.

I used to download SS to around 6Mpixels (using the downsize functionality in Lightburner), but then I began to wonder whether the buyers of singles and Enhanced licenses would prefer something bigger. So, I stopped the downsize and have a general approach that an image from my Canon 5D MkII would be reduced to 4600 pixels on the long side. That seems to work for all sites and I rarely have rejections for technical reasons.

However, SS does have a very strange view of narrow depth of field - they really like to see a lot of the image in focus, even if it may work artistically or commercially to have a narrower band of focus. No amount of downsizing would make much difference in those cases.

Steve

Nobody buys large xlarge or maximum sized images for the web. There's no point. When people buy those big images it's for print which is still a thing. I've never bought an image that couldn't cover a full standard page which requires 8.9 mp (if you include bleed). If you go smaller than that you will limit the value to buyers.