The Java uploader still gives "technical error".  Amazing. It's been weeks.

SS no longer accepts nor allows use of NASA images in your work because they say it must be all of your work and no one elses can be a part of it even if it is allowed to be used in a commercial manner.

Quote

Hello All,

Sorry for the delay. 

Regarding questions that came up about our policy with respect to public domain images:

Public domain images are typically those images for which the copyright has expired. Generally, it is safe to say that any image (published or unpublished) created before 1892 or by a U.S. artist who died prior to 1942 is in the public domain in the United States. It is not however easy to determine if an image fits those criteria and is in fact in the public domain.  As copyright laws vary from country to country, determining the copyright status of images created outside of the United States is more complex. 

Unfortunately, researching and verifying the copyright status of public domain images is not practical as part of the review process. On occasion, our policies have attempted to be more forgiving, but we can no longer accept public domain images.  For the foreseeable future we will be adhering to our existing guidelines, which prominently state "submissions must be wholly owned by the submitter. Found or public domain images or footage cannot be submitted under any circumstances."

http://submit.shutterstock.com/guidelines.mhtml

Thanks for your understanding and we sincerely apologize for any confusion.

There are no plans to remove public domain images that are currently in the collection, but we reserve the right to do so as we perform routine reviews and quality assurance. 

In addition, thank you for the feedback regarding our other review policies and communications.  As always, our goal is to have and maintain the best submission experience and your feedback is helpful.

Best Regards,

Scott
VP of Content
Shutterstock

Areas in microstock that need more great photos:

    Travel photography, special places and extreme nature
    Really, really old people
    Contemporary fashion
    Policemen, military and state officials from all over the world
    Pictures of currency other than Euros and Dollars
    Aerial pictures
    Stylistic still-life in soft and low contrast colors
    Fantastic panorama shots in high quality
    Motion-blurred and lively pictures
    Artistically executed lifestyle, edgy
    Natural looking people that don�t look like microstock models

Areas in microstock that are saturated and really require fantastic work if you want to stand out

    Businesspeople (too easy to put a group of people in suits around a table)
    Isolated people on white (too easy to duplicate and too many people are shooting it)
    Anything with a laptop
    Nudes
    Spa (requires so little set-up and every model in the world wants a spa shoot)
    Medical (Too easy: a scrub and a model)
    Backgrounds and �lonely tree� kind of pictures
    Beach pictures (really too easy)

I'd agree, it's not "AI bots" doing reviews. You can check things like size and format with a computer program and save the reviewer time, so they don't have to look. I don't believe that SS uses image recognition for reviews. There's nothing but forum rumors and suspicion that claims they do. One would think that by this stage of the game, someone on the inside would have told us the facts? Like yes they do, or no they don't. 

As for soft focus and blurred or depth of field. I don't bother anymore. Soft in back can pass, anything soft in front = rejection. It's their standards and anything like that with any artistic exposure or motion blur, is more likely to get refused. Same goes for shadows. Even useful and intentional shadows! Frustrating.

My favorite part, that answers an often asked question: "Of more than 375,000 contributor accounts that have been created, less than 40,000 contributors have been approved." What's that? Oh about 10% pass the first review. And of those? 13,065 authors have portfolio with less than 50 works, is 38.86% from the total amount.

Roughly 30% of the total approved contributors (10,000 people) have over 250 images on SS.

40% less than 50 images, 30% with more than 250, 5% with more than 2000 images. (people here are much of that 5%) This can also be read as 70% of the people who joined and passed the test have less than 250 images on SS! 

Quote from: leaf on September 19, 2012, 00:53

Here's where Shuterstock talks about reviews in their IPO

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         The content we provide to our users is created by a community of contributors from around the world and is vetted by our specialized team of image and video reviewers. Whether photographers, videographers, illustrators or designers, our community of more than 35,000 approved contributors range from part-time enthusiasts to full-time professionals, and all of them must meet high standards in order to work with Shutterstock.

        In order to become a contributor, an individual must submit an application that includes a portfolio of images or videos. Of more than 375,000 contributor accounts that have been created, less than 40,000 contributors have been approved. Once accepted by Shutterstock's review team, contributors can upload as many images as they would like; however, every submitted image is reviewed and either accepted or rejected by our team to ensure that images in our library meet certain standards of aesthetic and technical quality. Approximately 38 million images have been submitted to our review team by approved contributors and, of those, only 20 million, or approximately 50%, were approved and made available in our marketplace. Each image that is rejected by our review team is tagged with at least one rejection reason that is communicated to the submitting contributor to help him or her to improve and to give insight into our review standards. Such rejection reasons include focus, composition, poor lighting, trademark infringement and limited commercial value. We combine proprietary technology and highly trained content review staff to deliver sophisticated yet efficient image review�we typically process images within 36 hours of upload.

        Contributors are required to associate keywords with each image they submit in order to make their images more easily found using our search algorithms. Keywords usually contain both descriptive terms that literally identify the content of an image (e.g., "padlock") and conceptual terms that describe what an image might convey (e.g., "security"). We have over 650 million contributor generated keywords in our database, an average of approximately 30 keywords per image.

        All images accepted into our collection are added to our website where they are available for search, selection, license and download. Contributors are paid monthly based on how many times their images have been licensed in the previous month. Contributors may choose to remove their images from our library at any time. Due to our large number of contributors, we do not have any material content supply concentration; the content contributed by our five highest-earning contributors was together responsible for less than 4% of downloads in 2011.

        Shutterstock provides different earnings structures for photographs, illustrations and vector art, and for video footage:

http://secfilings.nasdaq.com/edgar_conv_html/2012/08/30/0001047469-12-008610.html#A2210439ZS-1A_HTM_BG47301A_MAIN_TOC

They do refer to software in this sentanct "We combine proprietary technology and highly trained content review staff " but I think they are talking about the proprietary tech the review staff use, and not some tech to review the images automatically.  In the rest of the write up it talks about each image being reviewed by a person.

Quote from: ruxpriencdiam on September 18, 2012, 18:58

Quote from: cuppacoffee on September 18, 2012, 16:28

Yeah, but... it might have been read before you edited it. Lots of people read posts but don't comment. If you write something and it is read and that person thinks that it isn't worth coming back to and then you edit it to add some brilliant additional text to make it better, or different, those that read it first might not realize you changed it.

Their loss!

You actually get 2 minutes to edit your post before it will be labeled 'edited'.  So if you see a spelling mistake and change it or add something else right after you won't see the edited note.

edited... but you wouldn't know it