I would leave 123RF off any list of best agencies unless you are asking about 5 or more years ago.

Alamy still sells ok for me, although down last year, and what they have been doing isn't very encouraging.

DT remains steady, and they haven't screwed contributors in a long time, but they are also pretty small compared to AS, SS, and IS. Almost all sales there are .35 subs.

I haven't had a batch rejection in a while - but when I did it was for "quality" whatever that means, and the batch before and after with very similar if not exactly the same sort of images, camera, lighting, and processing was accepted.

Since my batches are small, I just shrugged it off, maybe I should make a folder of resubmit images like I did for SS - which got almost all accepted on round 2 with no changes. It just made more work for everyone. Back when SS had a forum I remember people would post rejected images and the forum members would attack like a pack of hyenas and rip them all apart. I think someone posted some best sellers as rejected images - they got ripped apart too.

I think it is clear that there is something wrong with the AI image acceptances - maybe it is better now, but the number of people with extra fingers and arms is a little alarming not to mention trademarked logos etc. Also when an entire batch of all sorts of images gets rejected for the same reason - unless it is something like sensor spots or a monitor that is not calibrated correctly it makes one highly suspicious, even more so when images from the same shoot get accepted in the batches earlier or later.

Sure it is possible for anyone to miss something in a pic - but for an experienced submitter to make the same mistake for an entire batch that includes images from multiple shoots processed over multiple days - that seems a little unlikely.

I bet it would be pretty interesting to run an AI analysis comparing the different reviewers and the submitters and acceptance ratios per batch plus sales numbers.

Me too, best SS November month ever, just sold a SO image this morning for $108, for example, a rare event. Strangely, even though I have images from many remote countries such as Namibia, Nepal, Burma, etc., my best-sellers are all from my hometown, Quebec City, or Montreal or the Quebec province.

Nice sale, I wonder if the majority of your sales are of localish things because SS search prioritizes local artists in the search. - good if you live near a large buying population and have local content. Not so good if most of your content is from somewhere else or you live in a fairly remote area. I did notice a drop when I changed my address from an urban area to a rural area.

It would be nice to think that buyers would value authenticity for at least some applications - but if past history is any guide then they won't really care. You would hope they at least want the correct number of arms and fingers or chair legs.

I figure by next year the AI will be able to more competently copy all of the sort of things it has been trained with - so generic stock sort of things will be saturated. Maybe buyers will be sick of the AI look, or maybe they will still be infatuated with it. At some point I think that unless you have reality to compare with the AI images you won't actually be able to tell which is real. It still might be easier to pick an AI image out of a stock library than create your own, but most uses will not require actual real photos - which even now aren't necessarily all that real anyway even if there is no AI involved in their creation.

The agencies will be happy to eliminate our part of the process if they can - even if that means no new images to train their AI with.

I haven't noticed it on Adobe, but on SS and IS a regular seller would suddenly stop when the search got changed.

I have always been annoyed and question what is going on when an entire batch gets rejected for the same reason. My batches are rarely all from the same photo shoot and are often quite different and when one batch is 100% accepted and the next is 100% rejected it does not inspire confidence in the review process, although it does suggest that it is a human reviewer and not a so called AI bot.

How all the AI dreck gets through is another question.

Canva's user interface is the opposite of intuitive for me. I bookmarked links to most of the things I want to see, but I still have to look around and click to get there because of how their pages work.

I also just checked how many items I have - down 97 from last time I checked. I have no idea what has been removed or why.

Clear communication is not their strong point. 

September earnings are posted

applies up 38%, exports up 25%, income up 3.3%

I guess it is good it didn't go down again, but they are getting a lot of use for not much $ for me.

I had the missions last week, and kept the tab open, when I refreshed the page I got

"
{
    "code": 113,
    "message": "User is not a member of any mission request"
}
"

For the greenscreen one, if you had a good greenscreen setup in a studio you could just take video for a few minutes doing high speed poses and then pull every 10th image out or something similar to help train our replacements.

Maybe sticking with the old non CC photoshop tools will be a selling point eventually. I'm surprised that the so called AI makes up nonsense text when it probably should be able to recognize what language it is and actually recreate the text even if it doesn't get the font or every word correct. It certainly makes any image that has been uprezzed a bit suspect now since it is actually making up details.

The lines between an image that is of reality and one that is of something more (or less) has always been a bit blurred, especially in the world of stock images, but this makes it a lot more of a gray area. I wonder if the next step will be a using a program to strip all mention of AI out of the metadata before uploading.

Using AI to identify AI probably usually works for now, but if you train the AI to make images that another AI can't identify as such that will probably work for a while too. What a mess the agencies are in. The fact that they are so bad at keeping people from uploading complete blatant copies, horrible obvious spammed keywords, and 3 legged 6 fingered people makes me think they won't do very well at dealing with this much more difficult challenge.

cryptically and poorly

second on what is the criteria etc. for if they are accepted. I have no interest in doing a heap of work that could be arbitrarily deemed not worthy and thus no return for me.

I just tried their search - with the AI on it brings up all sorts of images that don't include the searched for keywords. The order of the keywords is very important, but the results have all sorts of things that shouldn't be there.