I am kinda fed up of their stupid "this is well covered..." rejections. I can see they have several similar photos - so what? My photos might not be better but they certainly are not worse than the ones they already have - so I want my chance to compete. It is not my fault somebody else started with them earlier and had already sent something similar. My pictures deserve to be allowed in that competing business. Let buyers decide which one to download. In many countries it would be even against law to prevent competition in that way. E.g. in my country if I were not allowed to sell - say - flowers just because somebody else is already selling them, I could appeal to the law and I would win. This "well covered" sh-t is all wrong. Why do not they just delete the old unsold similar "well covered" images instead?

Totally agreeing with you. They shouldn't punish the contributors for their own mistakes. I mean, it's not our fault that they used to accept a lot of crappy photos and now have a full database. Just because a subject is well covered doesn't mean that the photos they already have are any good.

CCK I think that day is coming.  When the microstocks were getting started, their goal was just big archives.  Now they're done trying to impress buyers  with how many million images they have, and want to cut back on reviewing expenses.  So the whole thing is turning around and they may get to a point where all they accept is whatever is posted on a "wanted this week" list.

They've concluded that crowdsourcing can provide all the quality they will ever need and all the contributors they could ever want, for just token payments.

Personally I don't think they're correct, but it will take time for things to turn around and new players to get started. 

Does that mean that we should all search the database for what we are going to upload to see how much of the same is already there? I don't think we all have time for that!

That's exactly what DT wants us to do.

The problem is, I've done that in the past, and sometimes still gotten "well-covered" rejections.

Searching for subject covering can give you a geenral idea, but it doesn't help always as the reviewers themselves are not doing the search before rejecting for well covered subject. I'm sure most of time they are just guided by their feeling how an image is well covered. I have recently had an image of ivy seamless background rejected on DT even though there was only one ivy background in the database and it was not seamless. After I resubmitted, with results from the search, the image was accepted. So I'm pretty sure, it is either not in their requirement to do the searches before rejecting, or they are not doing what they are supposed to do.

DT rejected my rose image because of "well covered..." reason. I resubmitted it with explanation there is no such beautiful red rose in their database, with such evenly spread raindrops, and so brightly red, but they rejected it again 

awww whitechild, i guess dreamstime does not soften with poetry 

Just abnormal rejections. Plus abnormally low sales.

That's not a good approach 

I've heard many claims from various microstocker to give up with this stock. Now, I believe that this might be the case.

Thank you! It makes it much easier to know what to improve if I get concrete reason.

Achilles ~ Thanks for that information.  The "well covered subject" rejection can be confusing, especially for someone who takes many photos of the same subject.  For example, my portfolio is FULL of animals (esp dogs).  I can get a rejection one day for "well covered subject" and turn around the next day and have another photo of the same subject approved.  I pretty much decided on my own the "well covered subject" rejection just meant my picture wasn't good enough to compete against the numerous others already uploaded on DT. Which is totally fine to me, because I'd rather have a small portfolio with lots of sales than millions of images on-line and very few sales.  

Now, if you could just get the "Poor lighting" rejection to have just a bit more clarity to give some direction to member (ie: underexposed, overexposed, blown highlights, too dark, too light, direct flash etc.) it sure would help me improve my approval ratio....  

Just got another photo of fire flames rejected with the reason "We are looking for images that exceed the technical quality and creativity of the images already online. Thank you"
I have many photos of flames and I have not been able to get any of them accepted recently. It feels like there is a brick wall now built for this type of shots. The funny thing is all my recently rejected fire photos were shot with brand new Canon 5d Mark II in 21Mp quality. Half a year ago a lot of similar photos from me was accepted without a single problem. And those accepted were shot on an older 5D in 12Mp. Go figure.

I was overly optimistic when I recently shot a dozen well lit 21 megapixel wooden textures. The wood panels were very beautifully worn and I thought these were the finest wood textures ever.

I was prepared for rejections, but DT rejected them all. DT and FT seems to be very hard on textures nowdays.

BTW, three of the textures sell like hotcakes on SS