I also think it would be a good idea to delete some of those pics that really are too similar. Like 30 photos of the same pencil from the same contributor. Yes, it would require some resources, but it would pay out because it would make the site more appealing. Also it would solve some of the problems mentioned in the search engine thread.

This has struck me since day one as the biggest flaw and a huge problem, on every site!

http://tinyurl.com/cospck

Example, not picking on this person, and look at the keywords on the best selling image with two sales.

accident auto automobile beautiful blue break breakdown broken call car cell child childhood clueless complicated damaged drive engine female fix frustration girl hands heart help helpless hood hopeless kid look machine mechanic mechanical mobile motor motorcar parking phone red repair ride scarf solution stop support trouble unhappy vehicle wait winter woman work worries young



Do they have child drivers licenses now? Help me with Heart and red.

He left out dirt, shoes, weeds, bluejeans, sky, clouds... 

Only for the brave, take a look at this, after you look at the keywords. Guess what the photo is? I left off the last few words, which are actually what it is.

a fire a kiss an old age chomk dialogue ecology it and it kiss love love it matches kiss the burnt down matches kiss the burnt matches which have burnt down matches the creative

http://us.fotolia.com/id/12673387

Worst example, but worth the humor of it all, most of these do not include plurals.

FT Red Tomato = Search results: 25807 files
StockXpert Results for "red tomato" 16928 Images
BS = 9,758
123 = 10000 matches
DT = Search results: 24,705
IS = Search results: 24,705
SS = 30,566 results.

The horses are out of the barn, no use to try to close the door now.

DT isn't being stupid, they are sticking their finger in the dike, trying to stop the flood.

They're trying to stop the flood, but they already have 6 feet of water in the basement and no way to pump it out.

Old one: It's too late to remember to drain the swamp when you are up to your a$$ in alligators. 

How do you go back and edit 6 million photos for keywords, extended redundant series shots, or potential infringing content?

They could throw up their hands and say, it's impossible, or start watching the incoming material, and some day work backwards to make corrections for previous loose regulations. Best part is, I'm not the one who has to figure out how to fix this mess. 

Rejecting new images is easy. That actually reduces your labor costs because the screeners spend less time checking quality at 100%.  Weeding out the junk from 6 milllion old images would be extremely expensive. All they can do is raise standards on new images and delete old ones, that didn't sell, automatically after a cutoff date - that costs nothing.  This is what will happen, nothing more.

This means they're now rejecting images that may very well be better than what they already have.   

Is this strategy going to improve the quality of the archives over time? I'm not sure, but I doubt it.

Has anyone ever gotten a keyword rejection from DT? Perhaps they never look at keywords.

I had one once(I typed leaning instead of learning where the spell checker does not help much ) and I could not re-submit, since the image size was too large(in megapixels). Had to do a fresh upload which ended in e rejection because of "this is not what we are looking for". This was quite frustrating but a mail to the editor was sufficient 

And yes the only sort of rejections I currently get is "well covered subject" and it does not help much to brows the galleries before submitting because also what I think is not well covered or a unique pic gets rejected for that reason. I found a subject what does appear not to be well covered and I currently mostly upload to this subject since I want to raise my AR.

I just had 2 of 4 rejected as "well covered subjects".  I suggest we introduce the WCS acronym to describe this trend. 

I guess what they want now is whatever they think they can sell this week, and nothing else.   These companies have enough "stock" images, they don't even want to spend time (= money) reviewing new ones. They want buyers to tell them what they want today, and then have contributors compete for the 1 dollar grand prize.  It's not "stock" per se, it's real-time "crowd-sourcing".

I just uploaded a flower pic 

Two offerings, none serious as usual. These came from DT.

We have reviewed your file and this is not quite what we're looking for. To which I'd like to add NQWWLF 

More along the lines of not suitable for prime time, or stock, or too many or LCV, NCV, Snapshot Etc. here's one more. I don't understand the Too Specific part at all.

This is a very well covered subject in our data base or the subject of your image is too specific. Which leads me to:  VWCS

The second part was directly from Monty Python. ITS

There's one we won't ever get anywhere, but you will get the point. Found Usual Content / Keywords - Unusable. I won't put the acronym down, but it's what they are really saying in all the other kinder rejections. 

Quote from: RacePhoto on April 16, 2009, 13:44

There's one we won't ever get anywhere, but you will get the point. Found Usual Content / Keywords - Unusable. I won't put the acronym down, but it's what they are really saying in all the other kinder rejections. 

  At least, it sure feels that way, doesn't it?   

my vote is for
 Found Usual Content Keywords Unusable
 the best rejection reason.
to which i am sure we all reply , " the feeling's mutual, dudes...i love tofu upside down ! " 
 

I'm trying not to overreact 

These microstocks are all trying to clean up their act.  Although I'm fairly new, I get the impression they just finished desperately racing each other to the magic "5 MILLION IMAGES" and when they got there, found they had a giant compost file of unsellable photos that buyers didn't want to wade through.  Now they're all rushing to the other side of the boat, rejecting all sorts of perfectly good images.   Who knows where this will end up.

I care for rejections when I think my image would sell and when it does on other sites. And when AR is important in the ranking of images in search results!

I just started to raise my AR up to 94% in march! And now that! I don't know what to do anymore. Stop uploading? at least my AR would stay like it is now and my pix will stay in the ranking in the search!

Some rejections have been spot on, for example reviewers spotting color noise in dark areas. But this "well covered subject" thing doesn't really make sense.  On the one hand they're saying they don't want more of what they already have.  On the other hand they're telling us to look at the "best selling" images and do stuff like that.   What the heck?

oi, look on the bright side. by the time we finally get to understand rejections, we can all quit microstock and start our own MIND READER  business 

And it is not even close to traditional stock rejections yet.

If the rejection rates are going up, I think the submitters shouldn't be asked to keyword and categorize images. That's something we should demand. I have a few "trad" agencies that allow you to keyword AFTER image is accepted, that's not as bad as on micro sites.

I think this rejection is fair if they do have already too many similars AND the new submission isn't better in some way (more original, with better lighting, bigger, etc).