Just for curious what's your fastest reviewing agency? Top Tier are my fastest (SS especially) and the slowest ones are Alamy and 123RF. In fact SS has always reviewed all my content within 12 hours. Ok, there are a few exceptions, but still. Keen to know your experiences in reviewing times?

Dreamstime is VERY fast. I think they actually employ just machines lol. BS is super fast too (same day). Then SS and P5 (one day or two). AS, iS and DP take maybe 3 days? 123RF just stopped and you have to email them to review so I dropped that agency.

Hey, thanks for your quick reply. Same thoughts here. And I might have to drop 123RF as well. No sales for three months.

That one is falling horribly. Sad.

ms is long term -- review times, like rpi, are meaningless metrics

which would you prefer

Site A with review time of Y days and sales of $Z

or

site B w rt 10 x Y days  and 5 x Z  ??

A few years back you tended to wait longer and get more rejections. Those reviews though were consistent and helpful. Consistency and quality control are more important. Adobe probably win but none of the reviews are much use now. The experience of being knocked back improved my photography and earning in the long run.

Alamy - 24 hours
SS - Whenever from 10 seconds to two days
Bigstock 1 hour or less
Fotolia/Adobe 3 to 4 days
Dreamstime 1 to 2 days
Picfair 24 hours
Pond5 2 to 3 days

The others I don't bother uploading to.

Odd one Envato 1 to 2 days accept it then upto a week to reject it for some BS reason and delete it

For quite a while Bigstock has been reviewing the quickest, in my experience. I've had things reviewed literally within minutes. Dreamstime is way faster than it used to be, for sure.

SS reviews in 0.45 seconds

Yeah, SS like  1 second, in the other hand, istock take a couple days, or freepik takes like a one or two months.

SS reviews in 0.45 seconds

Straight from their "Experts"


"If you have not a similar image in your own portfolio, It's probably because there's another approved image from another contributor that is very very similar to your photo to the extent that the image processing software has been fooled that it's the same photo! You can try again one more time and if it was rejected again for the same reason, then I'm afraid that there's no way to add this photo to the library"

Review times vary over time across agencies. The nearly instant reviews at SS seem to have dissapeared, and went back to the regular one or two days. IS indeed seems to take forever, weeks for video, up to more than a week for commercial stills, while Editorials are often reviewed the same day. AS is pretty slow too, taking up to a few days and DS is fast, mostly within a few hours.

All of this doesn't matter that much, unless you are covering a newsworthy item or trying to play a fast developing trend.

I think there is a "time sensitive" support email notification option for those cases? At least P5 seems to accept those.

I cannot understand why we all shoot SS on everything. Normal rejections, one to two days image curation.
Title rejections when I stuff keywords leading to a non-human logically readable title.

AS in contrast is (same small batches of less than 50 images) double or more rejections and today counting 12th day pending content.

The only truly "time sensitive" content I see are newsworthy editorials covering a very specific event, and this is not the main focus of the editorial section of microstock sites we are uploading to.

For SS for instance, you'll have to apply https://www.shutterstock.com/editorial/contributor-application