I'm showing +$200 on May 2nd and had opted out of AI as soon as the option came available.

Not convinced this isn't a bug with some of the previous month's earnings not being reset.

but now they are looking to make 'more improvements' to the contributor experience. Great joy.....!

Maybe the improvement means rolling it back a few years....

(ok. Wishful thinking)

Has anyone noticed that Shutterstock appears to be approving every image lately and very quickly? I did an experiment with grainy images SS would never have approved in the recent past but they too sailed through. I wonder if there's a catch...

I think its still just batch approve/not approve on a random basis.

Just had 120 images all rejected for focus.  Images taken different times of year on 4 different cameras in different lighting conditions all of which have had others accepted from the same shoots.  The only thing they had in common were they were submitted at the same time.

What i have noticed is far more rejections on weekends and Mondays - again queue size?

Im still firmly convinced if the queue is busy or similar they just dump everything in the submission batch for the same reason just to shrink it.

That said i just had a drone video of a mountain rejected for intellectual property.

Edit:- just looked and the previous batch of 80 all got approved within a few hours with no rejections at all.  So it does look like batch accept/rejects.

A quick note to confirm the last few questions...

Due to the current conversion to USD, a withdrawal is temporarily not possible.
As of Friday, March 3, the payout will be possible again.

Future payouts will be processed in US Dollars.

Thank you,

Mat Hayward

It's a pretty dishonest way of doing it.

If you want customers to only get paid in US Dollars as it makes things easier then why can't they also pay for Creative Cloud in USD?

At the moment its the worst of both worlds, paying for CC in local currency at a loss and now getting paid in USD at about a 10% loss.

Effectively a 10% paycut for all contributors outside the USA factoring in the conversion and rates from paypal etc.

Not a good look.  Commission reduction via the back door.

Does anyone received complimentary code yet? My photography plan has expired today and wondering what to do.

Nobody has yet.  Read the post literally 2 above yours.

Best option likely to pay for a month or two while you wait.

Im sort of lucky that due to timings my bonus packages wont expire until August.

Ultimately though i really can't see them coming at all this year now so preparations.

As others have said, the monthly fee for all apps is a lot.  A big chunk.  Is it worth it when i don't use most of the supplied apps?  Probably now.
Ultimately i tend to use LR/PS/Premiere and nothing else.

What i suspect im going to do is continue to pay for LR/PS as its "cheaper" at ~�10 a month but the extra then for Premiere is over �20 so i'll ditch it.
Most likely i'll buy Resolve Studio as a one-off fee.  Its arguably more powerful as an editor (effectively Premiere and AE in one) and once ive bought that im not paying monthly for it.

Ive got a few months yet to decide and see what Adobe do but currently it looks like thats the most cost effective thing for me to do.  After about a year of that Resolve and Premiere have equalled in cost and from that point forward, assuming no more Adobe codes, im winning.

The next milestone will be the email they send when you haven't uploaded in a while.

Doesn't give you the option to tell them why you haven't bothered...

our Tech Team will introduce a way for all contributors to opt out of having their content included in datasets

So they'll slow and delay any changes until all the data they need has already been used to train the AI and then pretend they care.

Due to the dashboard seemingly being designed by an 8 year old with no UI/web experience i wasn't aware this column even existed until i saw this thread and went on a sideways scrolling marathon.

So the first half of the screen are massive graphics advertising things that are of no interest to a contributor at all.

Submission status and earnings are randomly below that for no clear reason and lost in the clutter.

Further down the map, which now looks like a cartoon which no longer tells you what was downloaded without hoving a mouse over each one individually.

To the right, another massive graphics advertising something.

Absolutely horrendous.  Yet another Shutterstock "innovation" designed by people who have never seen or used the service in question.

Edit:- Ive "fixed" it by using the element zapping from uBlock origin to remove all the irrelevant top frame and graphics meaning my actual stuff appears at the top again.

Thanks for the response - even a "dont know" reply is a useful honest opinion so appreciated.

Ive got at least 8 months left on mine but it'd be useful to know at some point to decide if i need to migrate software to alternatives or not (or at least evaluate alternatives).

Not sure how much more excitement i can take.
*.

I miss the SS forum, until today I still can't understand why they took it down

Suspect because it was full of anger and (almost entirely justified) criticism of the site a model.
Not a good corporate look for potential customers or shareholders to see.

They'd need to dedicate lots of resources to policing and censoring it so easier just to can it.  As another bonus it made it much harder for contributors to communicate with each other and discuss SS policies and so on.