I haven't uploaded to Adobe Stock in months. Today I thought I'd try a small upload of 5 photos to see how long it took and whether they had recovered their senses.

The good news is that the reviews took only a few hours.

The bad news is that they accepted 2 and rejected 3 for "quality issues".

Sales are reasonable with the portfolio I have, but I won't upload any more.

The collection continues to get genAI content accepted with wonky hands, maps, piano keys, insects, sheet music, bathroom faucets, calculators missing keys and on and on. These oops images aren't creative; it's lazy AI slop and doesn't belong in any self respecting collection

Look at some examples from just the last week or so (click for larger version):

Will they pay $10 per image every year?
And what about video?

Perpetual = forever. One payment and that's it.

"Perpetual term: If any of your opted-in assets get selected, they will be added to the free collection for perpetual use. Once in the free collection, those assets won�t earn any additional royalties (since you will already have received the one-time payment per asset). The perpetual term and one-time payment will grant Adobe Stock the ability to keep the asset in the Free Collection indefinitely without subsequent payments."

Illustrations and videos are on a different schedule

Just received email about nominations for the free collection - $4 for one year or $10 in perpetuity

"How much do I get paid for each image? 
You have the opportunity to renew your files for a 1-year term or for perpetual use.

One-year term: For each selected file included in the free collection, you�ll receive an upfront payment of USD 4, for the one-year term.
Perpetual Use: For each selected file included in the free collection, you�ll receive an upfront payment of USD 10, for perpetual use."

I don't and won't participate in the free collection, but for those who do, cutting the annual payment seems like a low blow to me

My portfolio is still on Dreamstime, but as so many others have noted, the site is sells very slowly - compared to the major sites and also compared to itself years ago.

Just to give some perspective, my portfolio is modest - all photos, no AI - 2,659 files. Compared to the 50k+ portfolio, I'm tiny.

So far in 2025 I've earned $50.44; once that would have been a bad month!

I started at Dreamstime in 2004 and did a stint as an iStock exclusive from 2008 to 2011. My first full year back as an independent after that, 2012, Dreamstime netted me $1,632.32 and I thought that was barely OK.

In addition to increased competition, IMO Dreamstime hurt themselves with some overly complex pricing changes  that were very confusing for buyers. Files varied in price and it made budgeting for stock harder than at other microstock sites.It's been a slow slide down in earnings ever since.

Looking at DT's 2024 stats my average earnings per month was $14.39

On the plus side, Dreamstime hasn't messed around with contributor royalty rates (people don't like the $100 payout threshhold but the terms are clear and have been that way for ages, so there's none of the horse pucky other sites have engaged in. And they gave us a bonus in royalties during the pandemic - compare that with Shutterstock's foul royalty cut around the same time.

As long as they treat contributors fairly, I'll live with their painfully low sales.

The last small batch I submitted in December took just over a month. A few days before that I'd had one item uploaded earlier that day (a transparent PNG) that was reviewed in less than 24 hours. I've had most accepted but the rejections - the meaninglessly generic "quality issues" - make no sense to me.

I continue to keep an eye on the collection growth overall, and at the moment I don't see any point, for me, in uploading anything new. At least to Adobe Stock.

Last week (Jan 21 to 27; Monday Jan 20 was a federal holiday in the US) the overall collection grew by just over 6.8 million items. 88.9% of those items - just over 6 million - were genAI.

In addition to volume, genAI fakes with titles and keywords claiming to be real cities, animals, birds, buildings, etc. are being accepted.

The over-saturated fakes don't look like the original but there it sits next to actual photographs of the real thing. London, Paris, Seattle, Austin TX, Portland ME, Grand Tetons. Places large and small.

Earlier there were rules about not labeling things as if they were real when they weren't, but I don't see that any more aside from IP issues (such as artists' names or styles).

As a contributor, it feels like totally unfair competition. A form of image & keyword spam.

From the buyer's point of view they have to be super careful to avoid embarrassing their company because they didn't realize a title of "Custom House, Portland Maine: Historic Landmark" didn't mean what it said.

I don't know what Adobe Stock's overall plan is for this huge influx of genAI content - this is about 300 million new items in a year. That was the whole collection in June 2022 - has the number of items downloaded grown anything like as fast as the collection?

I'm happy that there's currently a market for photographs, but the potential for return on time invested (given I have the equipment and don't pay models that's essentially my total outlay) seems really slim.

Although I opted in to receive electronic 1099s last year, in today's mail there was a paper 1099 for 2024.

Same information as on the 1099 I downloaded on Wednesday

...
- in January 25 I had 322 DL so far
- in January 24 (on the same day) I had 480 DL

............In 2024 I started with 35,675 files and on 12/31/2024 there were 49,052...

I don't typically post in "how many were sold" threads, but thought I'd make an exception.

I'm a small producer although I've been licensing stock images since 2004. Right now my Adobe Stock portfolio is 2,503 images. It was 2383 at the beginning of 2024.

I've had 308 downloads so far this month and was thinking it was slow, but you had only a fraction more with nearly 20 times as many items. I'm gobsmacked.

I don't honestly know what that says about business at Adobe Stock or its customers' needs & preferences, but possibly it says that the market for non-genAI content hasn't evaporated yet (I don't have any genAI work).

It might just be a function of oversupply - you have good stuff but there's just too much genAI work for the demand?

In terms of your photos being boring, I would say that useful trumps pretty in stock any time - I think I upload lots of material in the "boring infrastructure" segment.

I hope you manage to work out something positive for perking up sales (and many apologies if this comes across as rude; I don't mean it that way at all!)

I'm new to using DeepMeta for iStock/Getty.  What are "connect" downloads, and why does iStock seperate them in the TXT reports?

https://www.fastcompany.com/1817835/connect-getty-images-leaps-21st-century

If you load these into DeepMeta 4 (online) you'll see that the amounts are very, very small for Connect royalties.

Quote from: Jo Ann Snover on January 17, 2025, 20:09

A decent month. I have to remember to keep breathing when I see a great license for one of my newer images - $122.xx and beside it 15% of that for my share!

I could double the royalty rate if I went exclusive again

.... most (maybe [?]  not quite all) of these high value sales are via Getty, so only get us 20%, no matter which level we're on. Remember, it's all smoke and mirrors (i.e. hidden in the Small Print) with Getty!

Good reminder!

I did go back to look, and that - as well as some other higher value licenses - were from iStock, not Getty. I take it that your Getty sales section shows 20% in the PDF statement versus your earned royalty rate for the other (non Connect) sections?

The month's RPD was better than many this year, but $0.68 is still pretty low.

Having been exclusive for a few years once before, I have no illusions. When all the agencies are behaving badly, the appeal of dealing with only one miscreant goes up

Question: now that the new minimum number of accepted assets is 150, where on my account can I see how many were accepted this year?

150 was the 2024 number. But if you look at your portfolio in the contributor Dashboard and sort it by Date instead of Downloads (dropdown on the far right), you can then count based on the upload date.

Click on a thumbnail and the file details are displayed, including upload date. There are 100 items per page, so you'll only have to count once you get to the transition from 2025 to 2024 (later in the year).

It isn't clear if the upload date or the approval date is the one that matters - once upon a time those would only have been a day or two apart - but don't cut it close.

...and then come on...come on guys,150 contents approved in a year are really nothing,and I really think we just have to thank Adobe who gives us free software every year,don't be greedy!

It's the huge change that's the issue. The previous two years the requirement was 20 and this year 7.5 times as much (150).

It also seems entirely pointless. If rewarding uploads were the only goal - and I have no idea what goal that would achieve as uploads cost Adobe money; it's only when licenses sell that there's any point in any uploads - then setting the numbers to get the upload volume desired would make sense.

While I do understand some people being upset they didn't meet the requirements...IT IS A BONUS! Why are you crying that you didn't get a BONUS???...

No one is crying

When a bonus is part of someone's overall compensation package and one year they don't get the bonus, they are often unhappy.

For a number of years - since 2018, and then you only needed one approved upload - contributors who sell a reasonable volume of licenses get the additional compensation of an Adobe Subscription. And the low end of the sales required is still extremely small compared to prior years.

It's not words that count when a company describes what's important, it's actions. And IMO this change is effectively saying that contributors who sell lots of licenses aren't important to them any more. They were before, but not now.

I don't like being treated this way and can only blame myself if I stick around, essentially telling Adobe Stock that it's fine with me. They send their messages to contributors with changes in compensation. We get to respond as we see fit.

A couple of months ago I had posted about the growth of the Adobe Stock collection over the previous 7 months; essentially that the genAI collection had grown much faster than the human-created portion (82% vs 6.1%)

Separately from the issues of quality of accepted items, buyers' needs or number of buyers are not growing at anything like the rate that the AI collection is. In the last two weeks (Dec 30 to Jan 13), nearly 13.5 million genAI items have been added to the collection. 6.15% growth in two weeks

Human-made items have grown 0.39%, just over 1.5 million items

Another sobering thought is that now the genAI part of the collection is over half of the human-created part - 231,557,938 genAI and 401,987,228 human created. The genAI collection today is essentially the same size as the entire collection in Oct 2020 (232,291,841)

Adobe's thoughts are likely elsewhere - focused on the builk of their business and the role investors see AI playing in the company's future earnings. Adobe Stock is not a significant factor in that drama - it's all about monetizing AI add-ons to Creative Cloud subscriptions and banishing thoughts about all those subscriptions vanishing as creatives are replaced by AI tools.

While there are creative humans licensing content from Adobe Stock for their projects, giving them the best stuff at reasonable prices means sorting out search results is important. Not sure that accepting masses of content that you turn off in default searches makes any sense. Revisiting the policies for what genAI content you accept seems to make more sense - view the collection as a whole and target gaps you want to fill.

Edited to add links to a couple of Reddit threads where Adobe Stock customers were complaining about the genAI content being a problem for them. The first one is recent, prompted by the recent search change. The second is older but has some recent replies as well. There's definitely a theme that for some buyers, default being to exclude AI would be a plus

https://www.reddit.com/r/graphic_design/comments/199xe3a/does_anyone_find_it_messed_up_that_adobe_stock_is/

https://www.reddit.com/r/graphic_design/comments/1i09zlh/probably_adobe_stock_hides_ai_images_for/

Some quotes:

"I use adobe stock daily and it became my absolute nightmare. Not only it�s littered with AI photos most of them are absolutely garbage. Full of artefacts that you can only see once downloaded. Give me back 3d rendered graphics if anything please."

"I use stock images A TON so we're always looking at different stock photo/video options....we ventured over to Adobe Stock. * pointless venture. It's almost entirely AI generated stuff. If I wanted AI generated I would fire up Stable Diffusion and have it generate me an image. I want my stock site to give me real life photos."

"My company also has the subscription to Adobe stock. Downloaded an image, used it in my InDesign file, submitted it for review. At first glance this images seem normal but once you start working with them you notice nothing makes sense and the details are all messed up. If I was paying for the image I�d be pretty pissed. I know there is an icon for AI images but there is no quality control. They are a mess and when reviewing the thumbnail before downloading it�s easy to overlook."