Quote from: MatHayward on October 25, 2023, 20:21

Quote from: Sandeel on October 25, 2023, 18:07
Update: Next batch of 13 images rejected as a whole!!!

Seriously?? Not a single image gets through? Is this the end?

Was it because they are autumn pictures and the review took so long that they are too late?

Mat, can you please explain to us what's going on?

I would need to see the photos. Share them here and I'll be happy to provide a critique.

Thank you,

Mat Hayward

Sorry, this is not about photo critique. Sharing photos, everybody finds something wrong with them. These are all poster-worthy images and if they occasionally reject one of them, well that's life, but in 2 batches in a row they don't take one image, and they are all professional high quality images with nice clean editing. I'm not one who submits to stock their byproducts, but only my very best work, and I have thousands of downloads a month with a small portfolio, so I'd know if my whole batch was garbage. On the other hand I looked at the new images in the search results and... well, everybody can have a look for themselves. I'd like to emphasize that this is not about my ego, I don't care about that stuff. It's serious business talk.

Something very funny is going on and I don't trust Adobe to treat me fairly if I reveal my identity here, after all the criticism I wrote.

Update: Next batch of 13 images rejected as a whole!!!

Seriously?? Not a single image gets through? Is this the end?

Was it because they are autumn pictures and the review took so long that they are too late?

Mat, can you please explain to us what's going on?

Quote from: erik trikowich on October 20, 2023, 16:49

Quote from: Sandeel on October 19, 2023, 13:17
As a high volume seller with a rather small portfolio I put a lot of work into each image, and Adobe (or rather Fotolia) used to appreciate that, but nowadays it's getting ridiculous.

I'm in a completely similar situation to yours! In one of the topics I wrote that they began to ignore me 100% after I refused to give my works for free download.
Have you noticed this trend in yourself?
...

Wow, that's an interesting viewpoint. I had never considered that. I didn't opt in for the free downloads either, but I can't remember when this became a thing. Did they start it recently or years ago?

Thank you all for the interesting input. I didn't know random rejections were becoming a trend. The AI stuff seems to cause even more problems than I thought.

Quote from: Bauman on October 19, 2023, 14:03
I agree with you. I am also a photographer with a small portfolio (around 5,000 images) selling a lot for 15 years.

The same thing happened to me for the first time last week with a batch of 15 images.

13 were rejected, and 2 were taken.

It had never happened to me. I have a nearly 100% approval rate at every agency.

I'm a professional; I shoot with a 60-megapixel camera and $2/3,000 lenses. I travel 30,000 km a year to shoot. Each image I upload requires 30 minutes/1 hour of postproduction with a $3000 desktop.

With this Adobe policy, my images that have always sold a lot are becoming invisible or rejected. Hidden by the sea of AI images (probably copied from some of our old images that were selling  ) that Adobe approves every day and which cost like peanuts. No photography equipment, no travel costs, no effort to learn the art of photography.

Thanks Adobe. In a few years, I would like to know from which art AI will copy.

There are contributors who upload lots of content including series, like 50 shots of the same scene straight out of the camera and they get through. I'm not condemning it, it's a different approach to microstock, but for contributors like us who work a lot but don't go for that kind of quantity, our stuff gets buried heavily in the "most recent" search" all the time. All I'm saying is, it would be nice if Adobe could recognize and consider the type of contributor whose stuff they are reviewing. If you upload few files and sell a lot, they shouldn't reject anything from you, and maybe give the images a tiny little help to be seen by a few. There is so much they should reject but don't, and hey, why not, let others have their chance, but they could show a little fairness and balance.

Quote from: Carmifornia on October 20, 2023, 00:30

I also noticed a trend that one illustration gets to the top of the search, sells well daily for about 2 months, then disappears. At the same time another illustration gets the spotlight and start selling well then also disappears, and so on. They are not my best illustrations even, so I don't know why those particular ones outsell my "best" ones by 500%?

I'm fairly new to stock, about a year, with only 3 pages of png illustrations. So I assumed that was the norm. Is someone hand picking and dropping them or is it an algorithm?

In my experience images can receive a kind of little bonus from the reviewer if they really like them, this way they get a slightly better positioning in the search results. But that's never enough, somebody has to find and buy them. Then they climb up a little and if a few others buy them, they can make it to the top pages. But there's also weird randomness and some images stay down even after several sales and then they die. And then there are those who make it to the top and sell really well (like 5 times a day, that would be over 1000 a year), but are suddenly "cancelled" nevertheless.

Quote from: Injustice for all on October 20, 2023, 03:19

Quote from: Sandeel on October 19, 2023, 13:17
I still earn my livelihood with them

in my opinion you should be more than happy and satisfied to be able to say this sentence,and don't get angry about a rejected batch,it can happen.

I had uploaded a batch of 24 videos and a couple of days ago they rejected half of it.Honestly,i mostly stopped for 10 minutes to understand why,and then I moved on.

in any case you can be satisfied and happy to be able to say that phrase"I still earn my livelihood with them"wow!fantastic!

Well thanks, but for me it's not a game of luck, it's a profession and I know what I'm doing, what sells and what doesn't, at least for my content. This is my main job and has been for over 10 years. That batch that was rejected was the result of 2 weeks of very focussed work for me. And I stand by it: it's highly unprofessional on Adobe's part, and has nothing to do with me being lucky or grateful or happy.

Many may praise Adobe to the skies, but I think they are being unprofessional. As a high volume seller with a rather small portfolio I put a lot of work into each image, and Adobe (or rather Fotolia) used to appreciate that, but nowadays it's getting ridiculous.

A whole batch of seasonal images waited a whole month for review just to be rejected as a whole! I never get any rejections at all, so a whole beautiful batch, are you kidding me? Did they even look at them, or are they so overworked with the avalanche of AI images that they just don't care anymore?

My new images are not presented to the buyers at all. In theory they have a chance if they are shown under the older bestsellers when people click on those, but Adobe very unwisely shows videos under photos and vice versa. Also the thumbnails there, especially for panoramas, are STILL all stretched, distorted and useless. The series that are shown when you click on "see more" don't make sense at all. So much is missing randomly. It's all a mess, and Adobe has NO IDEA which images have high selling potentiality and which ones don't. They mostly show the images that never could pick up properly, and even after years stick to those, instead of showing new stuff or at least older stuff that sold great but suddenly got lost in the algorithm. And when once in a blue moon an image picks up and sells 5 times every day, after one month they literally kill it by throwing it from page one straight to page 300 or so, never to be seen again. This is not how you find and sell successful content, Adobe.

I wonder how many people have noticed these obvious problems. If you don't agree, fine, but please don't write comments like "if they are so bad why do you upload to them". I still earn my livelihood with them, but the better and bigger my portfolio becomes, the worse the sales become.

Now it's back to the old design for me as well.

The total earnings value for the specific download types seems to be gone too? 

I want to keep seeing how much I have earned with footage, but I can't figure out how.

Why is it that often when they want to offer something new it is worse than the last version??

I know new things need some time to get used to, but with some things I know right away that I will never like them. In the old version every important info was visible at one glance. You could at once see how many videos or singles or ELs you had sold on a day. Now you have to navigate through dropdown menus and choose categories and file types to be able to see that. What kind of improvement is that?

True. They absolutely do not know how to sell the good stuff.

New images hardly ever take off, and if one does, it is killed after 2-3 weeks. For example I recently landed one that sold 60 times in 3 weeks, and that inludes the time it took to climb to the top of page one, then it was selling 4-5 times a day. Now today all of a sudden it was thrown back not a little, but to the bloody midfield, into nothingness. It is good stuff, and some of the images that I have at the top never ever performed all that well. There's no logic in that. New images are not given a fair chance at all.

Quote from: Uncle Pete on April 26, 2022, 17:16
Ah, so you are saying, someone shuffled the deck and dealt our new image ranks, in a different order. Interesting.

So that whole thing in the multiple webinars and files, and advice, about the rank being set in the first 30 days, isn't true anymore?

I don't know anything about the first 30 days, I must have missed that piece of info. What's up with that?

Changed algorithm means changed, not better for everyone or worse for everyone. Some images are moved further back, some are brought to the fore. That's what definitely happened. My sales are about the same as before, but there was a shift in WHAT sells. Some older best sellers were brought back from the dead and some other best sellers were disfavored. I had regularly checked the results for at least one very major keyword and I see different results on the first three pages since April, I mean all results, not just my own.

Also you can notice any algorithm changes if you go to your own portfolio and search for a keyword within it. The order that you see there is exactly how they appear in the main site's search. For example let's say you search for "flower" in your port and see image x at the top and then image y. Then you go to the main site and search for flower. Image x will be the first of your own images that you will find and image y will be the second, and so on. That's a fact, it was 100% and steadily confirmed for me, without any exceptions. Now if the algorithm changes, the sorting of your own images will suddenly be all over the place, and that's what happened.

As long as we can't choose a thumbnail for our footage, most of the files will simply not get noticed. It's simple psychology: the buyers will notice the more interesting thumbnails and watch a preview, they can't watch every single video and see which one is actually the best. The thumbnails have to be representative, which is often not the case if they are generated randomly. I noticed that my videos that sell have nice thumbnails and the non-performers have unfortunate thumbnails that by the way mess up my portfolio.

Any thoughts or infos I may not be aware of?

Thank you Lowls.

Regarding the algorithm, I observed several changes these past two days, I suppose that's what it looks like when they tweak things a bit. Now it is back to something similar to what it was before, but images got shuffled a bit, so that some old sellers that had been rather forgotten started selling again, but some great sellers got pushed back in the search results. My download numbers remained average except for the day I started this thread, when there was an unusual drop.

Something that I noticed is that when you choose a sorting like "relevance", "featured" or "downloads", it stays saved. I seem to remember that it wasn't the case before and it always jumped back to relevance. I hope this gives newer images a better chance.

@SVH
How does any of your replies in any way help the issue that I brought up in this topic? First I was talking about a search problem that fortunately was only temporary. It is obviously not in Adobe's interest that the whole translation tool stops working altogether.

As Wilm explained correctly and patiently, we were doing just fine in the German market, because back then Fotolia worked very country-specific. There was a "Fotolia Germany". We didn't know that one day the country-based algorithm would be changed drastically. One thing that still bothers me is that when a buyer looks at one of my images with english keywords, my old images that were keyworded in German do not show under it, nor do they if you click on "see more". Ande vice versa, when they look at an old best seller not a single new image is shown under it. In this regard each language is treated like a separate portfolio. I don't know if it's just imperfection or a deliberate decision, but it's not something that we were bargaining for. But anyway, please stop saying we are supposed to keyword in English, because as we repeatedly said we are doing it and you are not adding anything that we don't know. Thanks.

Thank you Jo Ann and Wilm. I was in fact doing very well in the German market and whenever I tried english keywords it didn't do well at all in the algorithm, because international buyers were more likely to be shown images from their own currency's area. That was changed with Adobe.

Back to the problem: thanks Mat, but right now it has completely changed again. The translation is working again, which is good, but the algorithm was obviously radically changed. For keywords to which I had several images on the first page, I now have none. I think they are tweaking things right now and hope it will become better than it was before.

You misunderstood. I do keyword in English. In the old Fotolia days it was recommended to do it in your local language and it did work great. Didn't I say I'm talking about images with thousands of sales? Those were translated into English until yesterday, but not anymore.

The algorithm apparently changed a huge deal today, at least for me. My older files from the Fotolia times are keyworded in German, the newer ones in English. Now when I search for something, the translation doesn't work anymore. It means that my older, all times best sellers are not even considered by the search when the buyer uses an English keyword. This wans't the case until yesterday, because I happened to check something and it worked fine. Now even if I sort by downloads, any best seller with thousands of DLs is just not there. Can anybody run some tests and confirm this? Mat from Adobe, can you help please? I really hope something is temporarily wrong and this is not intentional. Thanks.

Thank you for your kind replies.

I counted my sales of a certain time span. The average was 6.8$ per sale which is much lower than it used to be 2 years ago, when it was 18.4$. Last year was similar to now. From 45 sales 13 were the 0.25$ ones. I know I said it was more than that, but I was mistaken. There are many under 3 dollars, though. The highest one was 35$.

I could say all is good as long as I sell more files, but the question is: will the customers stop paying more at other places because of Shutterstock or not?

I'm increasingly getting those 0.25$ footage sales on Shutterstock. In fact it applies to most footage sales these days. What's happening and where is this going?

Quote from: ODesigns on May 01, 2020, 12:04
Split up your similars into separate submissions.

That's what I do to avoid those rejections.

Thanks, but I have no similars in one batch. They reject images in which they find similarities to files that are several years old.

What's up with these "similar content" rejections? I never had those, until recently. It's enough for a composite to have an element which I had used once before to get a rejection. In my case I find this extremely unfair, because the end results are not similar at all and I work for hours on every single image. At the same time I see whole batches of really similar content when I go through fresh content that they accept. Is there a way to make them see the injustice or is this a dumb robot deciding? 

Yep, they are taking back all those large sales.
All that remains are the under 1€ sales, almost all the time.
I was doing great on Fotolia, the "upgrade" to Adobe Stock is a total downgrade for me, and not just the performance, the website is utterly unprofessional too.
But if they go on like this, I'm going to be really angry at them. There is not even transparency in the sense that I can have correct stats. They took back a lot of money but the stats still show the higher royalties that they don't pay. Come on. Be more professional.