Ok, this has been discussed hundreds of times (i.e. SS review system), but I just want to be sure that I'm not missing something.

It's been suggested by some here, including on the basis of SS's official statements and reports that they use some sophisticated reviewing system. Others have suggested that most of the approvals/rejections are made by AI (scripts, algorithms, filters etc.) and not by humans. Recently I noticed how crazy fast is the reviewing process on SS. The batches are reviewed very often within hours or less. Today, having submitted another batch of around 20-30 photos, I noticed for the first time that when you go to the Contributor's Approval Status page, some photos in the batch are immediately marked as "Released:   Y, Status:   Pending" while others as "Released:   N, Status:   Pending". This is immediately after the submission, literally less than a minute or so after submission.

Could it be a proof that some of the photos are indeed screened and filtered by the AI and immediately trashed (those marked as "Released: N, Status: Pending"), and only the ones marked as "Released: Y, Status: Pending" are waiting for human's final approval?

Perhaps this has been noticed and discussed before, so sorry for possible spam.

P.S. Just amazing. While I was typing this post, most of those 20-30 photos have been reviewed by SS. Guess what? Rejected.

They certainly have been rejecting my pictures more efficiently lately . I doubt the level of inconsistency can be created by IT it takes humans to mess it up so badly.

Quote from: Sean Locke Photography on January 24, 2016, 17:13

Released: N means no model release, right?  Y means yes?  Nothing to do with review?

None of my photos (at least in the batch concerned) contained people to have releases. Yet, as said above, some were "released". Just thinking aloud..

Y/N for the release is something that you input. It has nothing to do with the review. Is it possible that you accidentally ticked "yes" on some of the images? Otherwise there is no mechanism by which that can happen.

Crazy rejections last few weeks, I just don't get how they come up with those hundreds of thousands of new photos accepted into the database weekly?

I think I recall them saying in their SEC filing that they only accept 60% of what is submitted.  So if, for discussion sake, they are accepting 750,000 per week they are rejecting 450,000 per week. So not surprising so much as the inconsistency. My beef is the JUNK that gets in while good content gets rejected. If they just fixed that we could get a feel for what/how to shoot and edit, like the old days at Istock when you could only upload 20 a week (that was my limit anyway).  You learned exactly why images were rejected and simply did a better job the next time. With SS, it is really a toss of the coin for most.