In general I think this is a good development that is way too long in coming. I can understand some sort of dynamic limits too, so they can't say exactly what they are since they are subject to change based on changing variables (like the waiting review list). I can even understand not wanting to say exactly how they are calculated to avoid people gaming the system, but they should at least mention what the thing they have the most issues with and tell contributors to avoid that to avoid harsh limits.

For example - is it vast numbers of poorly made AI images with similar keywords, is it entire series of images that look alike?

In any case I am very unlikely to run into any limitation on the number of images I upload and I'd much prefer a limit to apparently random rejections and or extremely long review wait times.

They really should have a different pipeline for AI, since what you need to review for that is pretty different compared to real photos - you don't need to count fingers on a real photo, you might need to check for digital noise though.

Is there any way to see the files they have selected for inclusion?

click the box "eligible for free collection" on the portfolio page

https://contributor.stock.adobe.com/en/portfolio?eligible_for_free_state=only&limit=100&page=1&sort_by=download_desc

I see we get 20% less for nominated files, but I don't see Adobe software prices dropping 20%.

That port is proof that whatever they are doing is simply not working.

The reviews have no constistency, every time a creator feels safe, the entire batch was approved, the next day it all gets declined again.

Sadly, it looks like they need to feel the burn from creators and customers leaving. But that shift is gradual and if the managers are tone deaf to what the creative community is shouting, then it will all take very long.

So the best thing to do is to go where we are wanted and my impression is that istock is currently making a real effort, not just with exclusives.

My RPD on istock is 64 cents, versus 83 cents on Adobe. So yes, it is less, but not a disaster.

My volume is still very low, but the old port is not yet activated.

tell me again how 85/15% is a real effort by Istock for anyone other than them

I do hope this isn't a complete pivot by Adobe in the direction of autospamaiuploaders.

I had as many sales today on DT as I have had on Adobe all week and more $ - definitely not normal - both an atrocious week so far on Adobe, and a rather good day on DT.

At 100/day "unlimited" downloads and 50% of $20 per month splits out to as low as about 1/3 of a cent per download for the contributor. Now that is exciting news, especially if it is for video.

.38 per download was pretty good, in fact over 100 times better.

Quote from: synthetick on April 14, 2025, 01:08

For anyone who has had files removed and can't work out why, please can you check to see if they were duplicates? Do you still have the same files in your portfolio, with file numbers that are different to the ones that have been moved to the Not Accepted tab?

Maybe I'm missing something, but how can we check? I don't record the ID numbers Adobe assigns to files and there's no way that I know of to check back on what files I've uploaded after they've gone through the review process.

I've dug through the 2 my husband got rejected and notice there is one image in each batch uploaded (1 batch of 6 uploaded 9.20, the other batch of 8 uploaded 4.19) that is missing from his portfolio. Is it possible an image got double tapped while uploading? Possible, maybe, but at this late date there's no way I could know for sure without having a accept/reject list from those dates.

At least for the files that I have noticed were removed with duplicates, if you find the file in the rejected list ( https://contributor.stock.adobe.com/en/uploads/rejected ) - sadly you need to look at them all to find which ones were removed via audit because obviously it would be too hard to let us search by rejection date or tell us which images were removed when they send us the letter.

mine were listed as rejected for "audit removal: incompatible with terms" - note the image id # and then go and search for the image in the whole database or more easily in your own port and if you can find it see if the image # is different.

I found one that was a lake removed for "incompatible with terms" - not sure what terms it might be incompatible with. I might have a typo for "Sierra" that is "Seirra" - maybe that is a bad word in some language? But a search for "seirra" reveals 17 results for seirra in images but over 3000 in premium. It is still visible if I search for it on Adobe but not under seirra.

In another note, I saw an image I sold a few days ago is now in the rejected pile. It still shows as 21 sales in my dashboard sorted by downloads, but no longer shows up in my recent sales under insights. I don't know if the $ for the sale exists anymore, I don't follow things that closely? The rejection is for IP - which is probably valid in a sense but it is a common enough object for which there are still millions in the database. I still have a few similars with sales, so don't want to draw any extra attention to those. I will miss it's sales though.

edited - I did a bit more poking around - the .png was rejected probably back at the original time of submitting, the .jpg is still there. I guess the recent sale was refunded or cancelled or something, but I did see an older one, or maybe I was wrong about the recent sale.

Adobe - and really all the sites do a pretty horrible job of reviewing and communicating the results to us. Not that this is an easy thing to do, but they could at least send us an e-mail that says we removed these images with a list of the images removed and the reason rather than expecting us to look through our rejected images list (mine stands at 439 right now) and try to guess which are new rejections and which are old - especially if they change the rejection reason to include AI for 8 year old images. I can only assume it is some sort of search and destroy program that is mostly doing a lousy job (as far as I can tell other than exact double images in the database). But they have enough images they won't miss the deleted ones - even if there might be a few less sales.

reminds me of the old joke, "how do you make a million in stock photography? .... First you start with 2 million."

It is funny how they follow almost the exact script. I can only imagine how much worse this sort of scamming will become once it is all "AI" automated.

There is certainly a factor for luck in this. My best seller on SS by a wide margin was a fireworks photo - it was a good photo which I spent a fair amount of time cleaning up so the background was pure 000 black but there were plenty of other images available that were just as good - some by me. The thing that made this my #1 seller was the day I uploaded it - a few weeks before July 4th I think (or maybe it was a few weeks before new years) SS had a glitch in their indexing and didn't index any new images for a few days. The luck factor for me was my image was on the first row for "fireworks" sorted by newest first. In those 4 days it got enough sales so that it got onto the first page for a best match search for "fireworks" and it stayed there for 3 years, often in the first line. Then one day SS changed something to favor images that were more pixels or from newer cameras or newer images or whatever and it dropped out of the first few pages of search and went from a few to 10s of sales a week to a few sales a year. The end. This image sold a few times on other sites, but never got the traction it did on SS.

So I had a decent image and I uploaded it at the right time, but I also got lucky.
You can't get lucky if you don't have decent images uploaded at the right time, but you still need some luck. Of course the more tickets you buy the more likely you are to win, and hitting niches or timing things well will help too. Steve certainly does that - for example his covid theater marquee sign. A good idea done well at the right time.

Interesting, but so many things that could be missing from the analysis - for example images with no sales at all, or perhaps images that sell very poorly on one site, but because they are being made for another site where they sell well (eg cat pics on SS) - you are learning to make them for SS, but not for other sites. As SS (or any other site) jumps the shark you need to switch which sites you make images for.

What really matters is return per effort. If you can make images that sell half as well but they take 1/4 of the effort it is well worth making those images.

Also image types where you have a chance of a great seller with a lot of low to no sellers too. It might still be worth making images of these types even though most don't hit if the few that do gain traction make a lot of earnings.

Same here when I search in my portfolio. Not on the general site-wide search.

I bet they don't get reset to base salary every January.