Author Topic: Adobe Roulette Rejections @Raul.Ceron (Read 4938 times)

cobalt · « **Reply #50 on:** May 16, 2025, 23:46 »

@zeljok

the second image has people in it. they might also not like the visible artwork above the door.

illustrative editorial is a weird thing.

@wendy

again, thank you. the whole upload process is on istock is very painful compared to other places. but with the coming merger they should be able to increase sales, so habing content there should help my monthly income.

zeljkok · « **Reply #51 on:** May 17, 2025, 00:05 »

Quote from: cobalt on May 16, 2025, 23:46

the second image has people in it. they might also not like the visible artwork above the door.

illustrative editorial is a weird thing.

Possible; but I had images where people were more recognizable accepted on AS. Artwork - I had whole bunch from Sagrada Familia in Barcelona accepted (as Editorial). So it's not clear at all, at least to me.

This will be a test - conceptually almost identical, just different museum; now waiting for review

Likely rejected, lol

cobalt · « **Reply #52 on:** May 17, 2025, 00:54 »

Good luck!

I am still new to editorial. I do cover the local carnival and some political protests.

But illustrative editorial on adobe will take time to understand.

f8 · « **Reply #53 on:** May 17, 2025, 10:30 »

Quote from: cobalt on May 17, 2025, 00:54

But illustrative editorial on adobe will take time to understand.

I have lots of experience shooting editorial. Years worth. I have shot for some major magazines and too many inflight magazines to list. I know what editorial content is.

I upload my content of a niche subject matter that is editorial to multiple sites apart from Istock. Istock always rejects them based on needing a property release as they deem so, and their reason is so crystal clear that I don't even bother submitting that content to them. Again, crystal clear.

Enter Adobe "Illustrative Editorial". Their guidelines are very clear and concise and no people at all. The only problem is their roulette rejections are just that, a gamble of my time and effort. I get entire batches accepted, entire batches rejected, and some images from the same batch accepted and the rest rejected. The only common denominator for the rejection is my content does not meet their "Illustrative Editorial Guidelines". I never get similar rejections or quality issue rejections on editorial. Never.

Interestingly the content they do accept sells very well.

I would not waste too much of your time trying to understand Adobe and editorial.

zeljkok · « **Reply #54 on:** May 17, 2025, 14:23 »

Quote from: f8 on May 17, 2025, 10:30

The only common denominator for the rejection is my content does not meet their "Illustrative Editorial Guidelines".
I would not waste too much of your time trying to understand Adobe and editorial.

Agreed. It is interesting though, AS and IS almost on opposite ends - even silhouette of human 10km away would be recognizable on IS, while AS is generally much more lenient. This is why I uploaded that Reina Sofia shot with people, as it was consistent with my past experience what they would tolerate. IS will also not take any art even as Editorial, and has that Famous rejection reason "This kind of place usually requires tickets/paid access, and as such photography rights are restricted" (something like this).

I tried to understand Adobe "Illustrative Editorial Guidelines", and failed. I don't think their reviewers understand it either. Once I had Image rejected for not meeting guidelines, only to discuss publicly with Matt here, who also couldn't figure out why it was rejected, and accepted it himself (I had downloads later). So it quite senseless, and in line with overall Adobe vibe, specially lately.

P.S. Here is example of my accepted Illustrative Editorial that is getting plenty of downloads:

[San Jose, Costa Rica - January 18, 2019: Concentric Red Circles Abstract Art Detail and Spanish Colonial Architecture on Plaza De Las Artes (Arts Town Square) near City Center]

Note people, note artwork. Maybe I am just dumb, but I can't understand why this one would be ok and Reina Sofia (with people and banner artwork) not

WendyT · « **Reply #55 on:** May 17, 2025, 17:46 »

Quote from: cobalt on May 16, 2025, 23:46

[snip]

@wendy

again, thank you. the whole upload process is on istock is very painful compared to other places. but with the coming merger they should be able to increase sales, so habing content there should help my monthly income.

@cobalt
I do not like the ESP process, I find that using DeepMeta certainly streamlines the process.
Having content should definitely help.

zeljkok · « **Reply #56 on:** May 17, 2025, 20:52 »

Quote from: WendyT on May 17, 2025, 17:46

Quote from: cobalt on May 16, 2025, 23:46
[snip]

@wendy

again, thank you. the whole upload process is on istock is very painful compared to other places. but with the coming merger they should be able to increase sales, so habing content there should help my monthly income.

@cobalt
I do not like the ESP process, I find that using DeepMeta certainly streamlines the process.
Having content should definitely help.

IS submission process is brutal. Amateur platform design should be studied at software courses as example how NOT to do things. Managed keywords nonsense, Artificial Batches, list goes on and above all inability to edit Metadata once image has been submitted/accepted.

Small detail that really irritates me is when session is about to expire, but they don't warn you. So you spend time editing and when you hit "Save" or "Submit" it kicks you off to log back in, and of course work is lost. Every site out there that just do simple pop-up "Your session is about to expire in X minutes. Please save your work and log back in".

You can argue not to use Web Front end for submissions, but if Web Front End is officially supported, this should be fixed

cobalt · « **Reply #57 on:** May 18, 2025, 01:53 »

Their submission torture chamber has not really changed in 20 years.

If the merger allows content from pond5 to be mirrored on istock/getty and has the same sales success as submitting via istock, then I will upload from pond5.

On the other hand in the current climate, the torture chamber helps to repel spammers.

Still, they should have improved their system a longtime ago. And being partnered with nvidia should give them enough software power to not just codevelop ai but also improve their system.

zeljkok · « **Reply #58 on:** May 18, 2025, 13:48 »

I was uploading some photos from my Spain trip this weekend. Alamy / SS / DT / AS / IS. IS takes as much time as other 4 combined.
On the plus side, AS Roulette actually accepted some

Jo Ann Snover · « **Reply #59 on:** May 18, 2025, 19:45 »

I have no idea what Adobe Stock is thinking about the management (curation?) of their collection. It's growing like a weed and the amount of AI slop still being accepted - including apple logos on computers, whacko fingers, stairs that would be lethal in real life, places/animals/tools that aren't even close, etc. etc. etc. - should be an embarrassment to them.

It'd be funny if it didn't annoy buyers (which some forum comments suggest it has been). Last week I noticed that the royalties on custom sales were going up - which means the number of downloads overall was dropping. Mid April it was $0.91 / 0.46/ 0.33. Last week it was $1.01 / $0.53 / $0.34

In addition to the AI slop, as others have noted there's masses of repeated themes even in recent works, so this vague PR-speak new policy about similars is clearly not guiding whatever it is that's acting as gatekeeper to the collection.

The video collection has been shrinking - or at least the stated count is - which is odd. This evening the count is 11,667,066. On April 28th it was 16,341,876 (it was just over 9 million May 15). Have they lost a partner's collection?

On a separate topic: iStock as a safe haven.

Look at Getty's Q1 earnings report from last week before getting too excited. You can find the earnings transcript online. Creative was down 4.8% and editorial up 4%. Paid downloads decreased 2.7%. They seem to be positive about the growth in subscription revenue as a percent of total - 57.2% up from 54.7% the year before.

Although creative was down overall, they said "Within creative, we saw strength across our premium access subscriptions, demand for video, and continued growth in Unsplash Plus. ...our agency business, which is accounted for entirely within creative, was down high single digits, due primarily to declines at the large network agencies. Being an almost entirely a la carte business, agency is where we usually see a slowdown in spending and investment as agency customers navigate periods of potential macroeconomic uncertainty." I'm not sure, but I think that translates into more of the very low royalty sales and fewer of the big ones that helps pull up the RPD.

cobalt · « **Reply #60 on:** May 19, 2025, 02:09 »

I get 43 million videos overall.

We did some comparisons on discord and had different numbers. Then someone said there are variations depending on location and if you use a vpn the numbers change.

Of the 43 million 1.8 million were ai video in my serach. Other believe adobe already has 5 million ai video.

The rejectiongate algorithm roulette is not benefitting buyers and it certainly is not able to detect or include similars.

Someone who accidentally uploaded similars in his batch got both files accepted and I also found identifal similars in the newest uploads.

The biggest problem imo is that there is very bad kw adherence in a search by newest.

Especially if you search by newest, the results for the kw people are unbelievable, All kinds of things show up, isolated watermelons, perfume flask, animals, nature backgrounds and sometimes also people.

It gets better if you add the model released filter, but the original results are horrid.

If I worked on the getty sales team, I would use thatbtest search to convince people to buy from getty.

I am not worried by the lower getty results. I think all their energy is on getting the merger approved and how to structure the new entity.

Once that is completed, I am sure they will make a big push in marketing.

They will have a lot to offer, in editorial they will have a near monopoly.

Adobe is behaving, very very strange. Not just the weird algo, also the ghosting of the creative community who is also their clients by using Adobe software.

How is stressing out the creative world good for their business?

Ai software will never become subscribers to photoshop, only humans do that.

Having a lively creative community was always a big strength.

The only real solution for the massive scam that is coming in is upload limits.

The community has asked for that for two years.

But instead they raised the limit to 10k, have the queue managed by a random algo roulette and probably let go of the excellent review team they had before.

The lack of clear communication hints at a huge turmoil behind the scenes. And also a lack of oversight.

Who knows what else is currently going wrong at Adobe?

I have shifted my focus to video and will try to activate my istock port.

While the percentages are much lower, the rpd is around 63 cents, which is not that far from the 83 cents on Adobe.

Camera video also seems to be accepted normally on Adobe, while with camera photos many are reporting random declines as well.

Injustice for all · « **Reply #61 on:** May 19, 2025, 04:55 »

My search for videos on Adobe Stock returns 44.020.702

then,the first AI video search returns 1.972.372

if you then scroll down and go to page 2 the search brings you back 7.164.751 AI videos,which is the total amount actually present at the moment,growing by about 2-300,000 per week from what I've seen the last few weeks.

I believe it is possible that the search may show different totals at different times of the day,because the videos shown will likely rotate and the total amount shown may vary.

cobalt · « **Reply #62 on:** May 19, 2025, 04:58 »

Interesting. I think a lot of people are trying to mass upload ai video now.

But video overall is still tiny compared to images.

There is a first mover advantage for those doing ai video now, but for me there is enough to do with camera video.

Jo Ann Snover · « **Reply #63 on:** May 19, 2025, 08:54 »

Quote from: cobalt on May 19, 2025, 02:09

I get 43 million videos overall.

We did some comparisons on discord and had different numbers. Then someone said there are variations depending on location and if you use a vpn the numbers change.

Of the 43 million 1.8 million were ai video in my serach. Other believe adobe already has 5 million ai video....

There are a couple of ways to select videos - the top drop-down list and the radio button in the left-side panel. In addition to getting different numbers by the three different sort types (relevance, downloads, most recent), you get wildly different numbers depending on how you select Videos

Probably a bug

Pacesetter · « **Reply #64 on:** May 19, 2025, 19:49 »

Cobalt,

You should apply for CEO of Adobe Inc as they are now listening to, and taking action with, your suggestions.

This from a contributor post on the FB AS Contributors page....

cobalt · « **Reply #65 on:** May 19, 2025, 22:47 »

I am happy to see this.

I have been shouting why upload limits are like a magic trick to solve a lot of issues for two months now in all their channels.

They should hire us all…or at least ask the community on a regular basis for suggestions.

We are not useless little creator ants. We are media designers who are running a business

They still need to go back to the quality reviews they had 8 weeks ago and get rid of the useless similar decline. That is anyway not capable of detecting similars and simply creates random rejections.

If uploads are limited to 1000 a week, I would still consider that to be extremely high.

The best would be dynamic reviews with the goal that all files get inspected in 3-7 days.

Ideally 48 hours.

Then you can create content for current trends or sudden jokes or memes or also political crisis, where demand abruptly goes up.

Reviews that take months have no value, we need predictable review times and we need reliable, logical quality reviews.

Fire the algo software and bring back the human reviewers. They were doing a great job.

zeljkok · « **Reply #66 on:** May 20, 2025, 00:16 »

Quote from: cobalt on May 19, 2025, 22:47

They should ... at least ask the community on a regular basis for suggestions.

I didn't agree with everything, but this is 100% spot on. Only way to properly run anything. Collaboration and Partnership. But for that one side has to come down from the cloud, start listening to, and treat little ants as equal. Can Adobe do that?

synthetick · « **Reply #67 on:** May 20, 2025, 05:10 »

A while back I filled in a Shutterstock contributor survey and one of the questions was that if they had an AI collection, how should they run it. My main advice was strict upload limits.

(I also said they should have a high level of quality control, and strictly only one account per person.)

DaLiu · « **Reply #68 on:** May 20, 2025, 08:47 »

How can I see what is my upload limit?

f8 · « **Reply #69 on:** May 26, 2025, 11:40 »

Almost 3 weeks later... CRICKETS!

I guess we can all draw our own conclusions of where we all stand in the eyes of Adobe Stock.

cobalt · « **Reply #70 on:** May 27, 2025, 01:45 »

Quote from: DaLiu on May 20, 2025, 08:47

How can I see what is my upload limit?

We can't. Which means we cannot plan our production in a professional way.

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Author Topic: Adobe Roulette Rejections @Raul.Ceron (Read 4938 times)

cobalt

zeljkok

cobalt

f8

zeljkok

WendyT

zeljkok

cobalt

zeljkok

Jo Ann Snover

cobalt

Injustice for all

cobalt

Jo Ann Snover

Pacesetter

cobalt

zeljkok

synthetick

DaLiu

f8

cobalt

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