In the last few weeks, the majority of my uploads of commercial and editorial stock photography to Shutterstock have been put into data licensing. It seems that if this trend continues, it will be increasingly difficult to grow my portfolio. Has anyone else noticed this trend?

This change (to putting most of my images in data licensing) has occurred in the last month. I do get occasional payments from the Contributors Fund.

Quote from: WD3 Photography on July 24, 2025, 11:55

This change (to putting most of my images in data licensing) has occurred in the last month. I do get occasional payments from the Contributors Fund.

in last 6 months i've had 6000 accepted and another 500 added to the data lib

I think the original poster was clearly talking about the last couple of weeks, not the last 6 months. I have also suddenly had most submissions accepted for data licensing, which I opted out of around two years ago. This year before the change I had around two thousand submissions accepted, three submissions rejected,  and only one accepted for data licensing. I have also done a few searches and it is clear that far fewer new images are appearing. I have no idea what is wrong with the images accepted for data licensing because Shutterstock doesn't share that information. I think it is reasonable to assume, though, that there has been a major change in Shutterstock's policy, not just an algorithm tweak.