That collage is quite telling Jo Ann.  My situation is quite similar to yours, although I keep my rather modest submission rate (5 - 10/week)

I have a question if someone can please enlighten me.  The following image was rejected as RF,  only to be accepted as Illustrative Editorial



Why???  Aerial view of Malaga, Spain.  Yes in the centre is Corrida (Bullfight Arena), so what?   There are several examples at Adobe Stock library that are not Illustrative Editorial where Corrida is much better seen:

https://as2.ftcdn.net/v2/jpg/11/84/02/33/1000_F_1184023369_K4DCbs3kn6MqpYUXWkHPIOgrf7zi5pvG.jpg

https://as1.ftcdn.net/v2/jpg/00/51/79/08/1000_F_51790812_VwiOapK6j66qFQ43uEojh0bxXqv5m328.jpg

... and many more ...

Any comments?

I think that the problem could be the little colourful cube on the right - it is Centre Pompidou building and its design might be copyrighted (as it is the case of eg. Guggenheim museum in Bilbao by Frank Gehry). But it is just my guess.. Or the illumination of the Arena (as the one of Eiffel tower), although this one does not look spectacular. Hard to say..

Adobe's rejections are 90% because of quality aspects. I guess that there are a lot of contributors who provide very good quality since the flux model is now very common.
So your competition might become a lot harder now.

Some two weeks ago I submitted 3 photos (camera ones), they were all rejected for quality reasons within 24 hours. Few days later I resubmitted 1 of them (unrelated to the other 2) and it was accepted, again within 24 hours. I have not done any changes, no downsizing, nothing. I do not know how to explain it, but there seems to be some automated pre-selection system whose criteria probably got modified between my two submissions. 

Quote from: cobalt on March 04, 2025, 08:52

Quote from: Bauman on March 04, 2025, 08:31

I'm not interested in doing other genres. I don't like them, I would have to buy more equipment, set up a studio that I don't have... In my life I don't just think about money, but also about doing a job I like.

Good luck with you attitude. In 2012 I started to work as a translator and everything went well, my earnings were slightly above average in my country. But recently (due to technological development) I have been doing only post-editing of automatic translations. If I had said "I�m not interested in post-editing, I don�t like it", I would have been jobless now.

I don�t mean it bad, but sometimes it is needed to adapt. You mentioned workshops, that might be a good complement to your microstock earnings. Or doing drone images - as Cobalt and other people mentioned, drone photos / videos are in demand and it would enable you to stay in your genre - landscape and travel. But you would have to buy new equipment..

Quote from: Yola on January 10, 2025, 13:34

Another interesting point comes at around 11:35 - an example of a bias in AI generation.

Because AI hasn't had the proper DEI training and just sees everything as just what it is?

I am absolutely against presenting Sherlock Holmes as a black lady or banning books and movies that were considered normal some 15 (and more) years ago.

But the example in the interview surprised me - the podcaster said he wanted to generate background (a shelf of a fireplace) for Christmas photos of kids from a kindergarten where his daughter was going. And he noticed that the fireplace generated by AI for white kids was more fancy than the one generated for afroamerican or hispanic kids. I will attach screenshots from the video.

If I was a kid, I would have been disappointed if I was assigned a brick fireplace without any decoration whereas my school friends from the same group got a nicely decorated ones on their photos (based on the colour of their skin, as it seems). That�s all.

.