...
Please let us know when it goes back up.
This week there was a long week-end holiday in the US, my sales have also slowed down.

Of course I will keep you informed - maybe sales will come in soon again, we'll see
What is interesting are the existing sales, which refer almost exclusively to pictures that were already online before but did not produce any sales.

The tip about the long holiday in the US was also kindly given to me in Discord.

And let's face it - we've all been trying to figure out how "the algorithm" works for years...

Edit: As a mathematician, I am of course always looking for patterns here, but presumably "the algorithm" goes far beyond my horizon ;-)

Have a good night,
Michael

On my account the payment of august just added to my unpaid earnings some minutes ago.
So it seems to be problem with their payment system... we will see :-)

For all those to whom this should also have happened with the account block:

When your account is unblocked, be sure to check the images that are currently still in the queue.
I have just found 2 more images from the problem series in my queue with the same unauthorised search term.

The queue was not taken into account during the account check and the deletion of the images - please do this manually (I'm in the process of doing it myself) as soon as the account is released so that you don't run into the same problem again immediately after the account is released!

Since I started the thread, of course I want to tell everything about this case to make it complete:

My account has just been unblocked and I was also told why it was blocked - it was about an artist with a "G" that we suspected much further up - and I had brought the soup on myself, as I had already admitted there.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank Mat and Mr. Gomez from the support, who patiently dealt with my impatience.

In any case, I learned a lot about copyright, possible copyright and the danger of confusion with styles and other existing things and places.
For me, it means to be more careful with these issues in the future and maybe rather look a second time.

And now I'm going through my portfolio and removing any weak points in it, because I don't want to have that again.

And thanks again to all those who helped with the search in my DT portfolio, that helped a lot.

I have uploaded there too, about 800 files and they do not appear in die unfinished liste after days.
Maybe that site finally exploded ...

I'm pleased to report that my Adobe Stock account has been restored and is functioning perfectly. However, the restoration occurred without any notice, email, or message from Adobe.

While I'm relieved and grateful that my account is active again, the lack of communication is disconcerting for several reasons:

    Uncertainty: Without an explanation, I'm left wondering what caused the issue and how to prevent it in the future. (I got only the same generic reply)
    Guidance: Without feedback, I'm unsure how to proceed with my contributions. Shall I delete any assets from my library or shall I change any meta data? What was exactly the reason?

It would be great if Adobe could provide some insights into why this might have happened and how contributors can avoid similar situations in the future?

Thank you for sharing the information!

I'm still sitting here with a blocked account (for 8 days now) and somehow trying to figure out what's wrong and how long I'll probably have to wait until the account is active again - should it become active again, because I don't know that either.

The only official information I have on this so far is: "If the account becomes active again, which is not certain, unfortunately no time frame can be given for this."
So, in short, I currently don't even know if I need to look for a new second job or not....

So I can only agree with your points... this lack of information and the uncertainty that comes with it is definitely grueling.

Have a nice day@All,
Michael

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Another small addendum @Adobe:
It would be enough for us blocked accountowners, if someone told us "You will get your account back, but it will take another 2 weeks to check and remove the problem images".
Or something along those lines - just a little more information please and not leave your contributors completely unaware of their future as is currently the case.

Thank you very much!

Moin as they say here in northern Germany,

I'm still searching my database of images and videos for possible copyright issues and after a very long read of many official posts in the AdobeStock Discord I came across that the filename can be a problem.... I probably wouldn't have thought of that, since the customer shouldn't actually be able to see it?!

Anyway, I used "Giger" in the filename of an image series, assuming the filename is "mine" - that was a wrong assumption it seems.
The metadata does not contain anything from "Giger", I always remove names (see picture below).

And the customer gets such filenames during download: "AdobeStock_123456789etc".

So I searched the current AdobeStock collection of AI images for "Giger" and found no image that matches the style of H.R. Giger.

So if the filename is part of the criterion and lead to my account suspensions (and those of many other), it gets much more complicated....

But maybe it's the demon industrial style of the chairs that then counts as Giger imitated... and in case anyone is wondering, I don't use MidJourney's automatic naming but assign file names by hand to make "imitating" images more difficult.
The more I think about it, the more sure I am that this must be the reason for my blocked account.

@Adobe:
I'm happy to remove these images immediately, no problem :-)

Greetings Michael

Hi Michael,

I hope things will get resolved quickly for you. It should indeed be a warning for people submitting AI content while having also a large non-AI portfolio. But I am just wondering here. You were a devoted advocate for Adobe here (I even called you a groupie once because of your love for Adobe). Whenever Mat came here to give some answer (if it was helpful or not) you praised him and Adobe even though some of us were quite critical on Adobes actions or Mat answers.

Now that Adobe has put you in this predicament, do you still praise Adobe and think they are so much better then the other agencies?

Hello SVH,

I remember well that you said that. But the phrase "praised" seems to me a bit over the target :-)

Currently there are clear problems with the hardcore blocking of accounts - and it's about a lot of accounts, as you can see in Discord, it goes up to the upper ranks of "Top 500" accounts.

And I certainly don't praise Adobe for blocking the contributors here with a "zero information policy", without leaving any information and fobbing them off with a general sentence on the subject of "infringement" of something.

If there is a problem with images, then they should be deleted with a message about it, as it has done a while ago for example Alamy - at other agencies (and I did not think I would say that...) like 123rf, Dreamstime and even at Shutterstock, images with brand names do not even go to the review (I just checked this in my portfolios).

Obviously these images went through the review at Adobe and yes sure, I (we) should have paid attention myself, but as many others have already written, you shouldn't just dump this on the contributor.

To answer your for me quite provocative question, whether I still praise Adobe to the skies: No, currently certainly not.

However, if the accounts are restored quickly, I maintain that it is currently one of the best agencies for us and will probably remain so.

Michael

Quote from: Her Ugliness on August 26, 2023, 01:28

No, as Adobe's rules does not forbid having multiple accounts anywhere.

Mat, can we get an official word about this from Adobe?

This text (dealing with the same question) is taken from the AdobeStock Discord:

"Adobe does not allow anymore multiple accounts even if you're not banned. If you're banned, you have wait till you get unblocked. Creating a new account will just get your second account blocked too, because you sign TOS as a person, not as an email.
Adobe used to allow making multiple accounts for this, but does not anymore. In the case of blockage, ALL your accounts will be blocked, since you're blocked as a person, not as an account."

A friend was kind enough to post that in a German forum.

@blvdone:
One will find very many examples here, probably tens of thousands are included there.

The big question that arises for me in the meantime, why have only some accounts been blocked?!
But maybe that will still turn out with my account - the uncertainty with me rises further, because I really do not understand it due to the abundance of obvious examples in the meantime.

Hopefully we'll have an answer soon, and more importantly, a way to safely upload our work for everyone in the future.
I would wish that for all of us :-)

Many of you have given me yes in the search in my portfolio at Dreamstime to look at what copyright infringement it could be. Thanks again, that was definitely instructive for me, as not all of these points were clear to me so far.

In the process, we had gathered the following:
- Cars and their lines
- Lion King (Disney)
- Caddilac

I have thereupon again logged in as a customer and have me a direct search always on page 1 found, to pictures which are on active accounts and exactly these possibilities the reason of a right injury quasi refute... that makes me still more perplexed, what with in the Portfolio probably wrong can be.

Attached are the sample images (see below)

As mentioned previously, we can't speak to individual accounts directly. However, we are evaluating accounts that were blocked this week for violating our AI submission guidelines, such as our strict prohibition against using the name of existing artists in generative AI prompts and metadata. Please be sure to review these guidelines here: https://helpx.adobe.com/stock/contributor/help/generative-ai-content.html. We will be unblocking accounts as we go through our review.

Thank you,

Mat Hayward

Hello Mat,

of course we can't talk publicly about individual accounts here, I agree.

My problem here also lies essentially in the amount of information that one receives as a "blocked" account. On my first request I only received the statement "there is a suspicion of copyright infringement" and additionally the statement "the account remains suspended until further notice".

For someone like me, who has put a lot of work into the account in the last 6-8 months to make it a financial mainstay, this is catastrophic. I am left completely in the dark about:
- what will happen next?
- in what time frame will the account be checked and the corresponding problem images deleted?
- will I get the account back at all afterwards and will I be allowed to continue selling assets?
- what about the money that is still on the account - it is currently frozen.
- what about the probably soon coming compensation payments for the AI training of FireFly, there my pictures and videos were used too
- etc.

I've already written you directly an email - that was perhaps a bit hasty, I've probably just grasped at straws, sorry for that.

I have searched a large part of my almost 40,000 pictures and videos on my computer in the last 3 days and actually also discovered a few possible files - many here in the forum were so nice to help me with the search, thanks at this point!

So I'm almost certain that some files slipped through my fingers - of course that's my fault, but I must confess that I would have hoped for a little help from the review process here as well, that you would get a hint of name right infringement.

A bit off topic:
As a software developer I can say that here a simple "Contains Brand-Blacklist" function when submitting the images would be enough to prevent 98% of these problems and also with the people who quite deliberately use these brand names, a submission is directly prevented - at Editorial this check just turn off .

Back to the topic:
I have now sent an email to Contributor Support and unfortunately did not even get an acknowledgement of receipt from them as to whether my case has even arrived.
In short, I'm completely up in the air.

I would really like to see some more communication - something like "We received your email, your case number is 12345 and we will reply to you in the next 2 weeks."

You've always kept us well informed here, which is definitely not a given - so I'm hoping for a good run out of problem cases in my account.
Maybe you could tell me if my email even reached Contributor Support and if there are chances to get my account back?

And one thing I can say for sure: I have learned the lesson!

Thanks and best regards,
Michael

PS: And sorry for the very long text - you can probably tell that this is pretty important to me :-)