Unfortunately, the much feared payment shrinkage at Adobe is becoming noticeable.

Previously, the lowest sale price for a file was 38 cents.  It gradually sank to 34, then 32, and today it went to a new low: 29 cents.

Perhaps they thought I wouldn't notice if it was gradual, but I do.

29 cents is still much better than the minimums at Shutterstock and Istock.  However, those two occasionally have some really high value sales to partly offset that (I had one that paid $110 a few days ago), of the kind that I never see on Adobe.

Based on the previous good payments from Adobe, I have been making an extra effort to provide files for Adobe (e.g., cloning out recognizable people, since they don't accept that as editorial).  However, it won't be worth the effort if they keep reducing payments.

It is quite inconsiderate of them not to give contributors any insight about what the future holds.   If they are going to merge the SSTK and GETY portfolios, we are just wasting our time uploading to both. 

I have been getting quite a few "similar content in our collection" rejections at Adobe.  Today, I got one for a photo of a unique (and quite attractive)  19th century building in a particular city.   I searched in Adobe's collection, and they have zero photos of this building.

Ok, it's not a famous city, and perhaps they expect that nobody would want to buy this photo.  However, if that's their reasoning, why don't they say it accurately?  More likely, there is no clear reasoning, just some kind of fuzzy algorithm.

Today I received an email showing a specific file as having been removed.  It came with the usual inane link, "review and learn why," which in fact cannot find the supposedly removed file.

However, when I searched for it in my portfolio using keywords, it turned up as still being there.   

The odd thing is that it was marked as "editorial use only," but this is a file that's more than 10 years old, before Adobe/Fotolia allowed editorial files.  I'm thinking that they just reclassified it, rather than removing it, and the email message is simply an inaccurate notification of that fact. 

I will check again next week to see if it is still there.

Quote from: marinb on January 06, 2025, 18:01
However, ... if you paste an AI-generated image (Image A) over an unedited image (Image B) in Photoshop, flatten it, and save the result, Image B's EXIF metadata will not retain or include any metadata from Image A. I think it will have NO data from image A, except the pixels copied. Basta. All the info, in the EXIF or out of it, will be the one Image B had from the beginning, except "edited in Photoshop" will be added almost for sure.

Yes, this works.   I tried it, just for curiosity.  It certainly wouldn't be worth the effort of doing this regularly.

It confirms that iStock is doing the most simple-minded thing possible.  They just discriminate against the use of particular software tools because they are capable of doing generative AI, even if they are not being used for that purpose.

To give an example, one of my files that was removed was a photo taken all the way back in 2003!  It was the interior of a subway station with the station logos.  I re-uploaded it as illustrative editorial.

Quote from: Dami on March 08, 2025, 18:43
Has anyone had any images removed yet? If so, do they get buried under Not accepted or does Adobe specify which images got removed?

Yes, they get buried.  It is frustrating for somebody like me.  I have been uploading to them for close to 20 years and have several thousand online, and over a thousand rejected over the years.  Finding the ones that have recently been rejected would be like searching for a needle in a haystack.

I have received three separate emails from them about this over the past few months.  In each one, they include in the email a thumbnail of one of the photos that has been removed.  As far as I can tell from this, it is because they have different IP standards now than in the past.  I have re-uploaded two of the deleted files, designating them as illustrative editorial, and they were accepted.

Quote from: cobalt on March 05, 2025, 01:57
The entire market is tanking plus there are genuine concerns about trade wars recession.

So not every move is because of bad numbers.

It's true that there is economic turbulence, but SSTK and GETY have both fallen much more than the general stock market.  As recently as November, GETY shares were over $4, and now under $2.   At the current price, the price/earnings ratio is a modest value of 14.2.

There seem to be concerns that AI will undermine the stock photo market.   I don't personally have experience with AI, but that seems dubious to me. 

Before AI, anybody could have avoided paying for stock photos by having their own camera and going out and making their own picture.  Obviously, it was usually more economic to buy stock.  Is it really different with AI?  Isn't it quite a lot of work to make a good AI image, and so more efficient for users to buy them from a stock agency?

Quote from: Uncle Pete on March 04, 2025, 17:20


Any of these are at worst $5/$6 better that the cost per share of SSTK. What's missing? Why aren't people buying at $22 to get back $28?

Proposed merger deals don't always succeed.  The share price of both SSTK and GETY have tanked.   Investors presumably think that there is a substantial risk that GETY will change its mind, and find a way to get out of the deal, or at least revise down the payment terms.

I just recalled that this can be found in the dashboard if you click on lifetime.  I had forgotten it was there.  I'm pretty sure that it does carry over from Fotolia.

Quote from: synthetick on February 19, 2025, 09:24
Are others seeing this? The legacy uploader is gone. But the new catalog manager now has the option to select video thumbnail, phew!

The last time I checked, the new uploader is more cumbersome than the old one.  That's just like Shutterstock, to change things for the worse.

However, sales there are so bad now as to be insulting, so I stopped uploading a while ago. 

To add insult to injury, there is a total lack of guidance from them about what the merger with iStock will do.  Will they merge their portfolios?  iStock has different selection criteria.  Will the SS files that don't meet their standards be deleted?   All these factors make uploading to SS a waste of effort.

I'm sorry to hear that this happened to you.  However, thank you for warning the rest of us about it.  I had quite a few old files marked exclusive, going back to the distant past when Alamy was the only agency that I dealt with that accepted editorial photos. 

I have now gone in and unmarked all of them.  It was relatively easy to do, thanks to the person above pointing me to the attributes feature.  Once you have located them, you can just select all and unmark them as one batch.

I have been a contributor to both, but my portfolio on SSTK is somewhat larger, both because iStock is pickier, and I have not bothered to upload as much there, as it is more trouble.   

That seems to go even more for others, as apparently the total number of files at SSTK is more than double what it is at iStock:  https://photutorial.com/shutterstock-vs-istock/#shutterstock-has-2-times-more-content-but-i-stock-is-more-curated

iStock has taken a more restrictive view of what is acceptable, based on no known legal principles of IP.  For example, I have found that they have zero tolerance for interior shots for editorial, even of public buildings where photography is permitted.

It will be interesting to see how they handle that, and whether they will cull the SSTK portfolio to eliminate images that iStock would not have accepted. 

Almost every time that I want to sign into my account, it asks me for a verification code.  However, a few seconds later, it signs me in even though I haven't entered the verification code.  (It does send a code to my email.)

Is this something other people experience also, or is it something peculiar with my account?

I hadn't actually realized that Getty was a free-standing company with listed shares (I knew that about Shutterstock).

If you can't beat them, join them?

We downtrodden, underpaid contributing photographers could save our pennies and buy shares in these companies, and make money on both ends.   However, the problem with stock market investments is that the senior managers of corporations often get away with overpaying themselves, so you could be both a photographer and a shareholder owner of these companies, and still get the short end of the stick.

https://www.istockphoto.com/photos/xyz where xyz is your user name

They appear to have sorted out the problem, as the missing files just popped up in my portfolio this morning.

I agree that commercial photos sell more frequently than editorial ones.  However, as we know, even frequent sales don't translate into a lot of money in this business.

I do this mainly as an offshoot of the hobby of photography, for what one might call artistic satisfaction, if that's not too pretentious a term.  I find that editorial photos are more likely to be used in publications and web pages that credit the photographer.   It's interesting to search for my name and come up with hits of my photos being used.

Quote from: Hannafate on September 15, 2021, 14:50
Alamy's opaque bookkeeping drives me nuts.

Alamy is the only agency that I deal with that refers to the total sales value in my "Revenue" chart, prior to deducting their commission.   The other agencies at least are honest enough to report what we actually got paid after they deducted their large cut.

I noticed an annoying thing when uploading photos taken with my Sony cameras (either A7Rii or A6500).  Caption metadata that has been added to the jpeg is lost.  This does not happen when I upload files from other camera brands (Panasonic or Canon).   Similarly, when I upload Sony files to any of several other stock agencies, they get the caption data.

If I use DeepMeta, Istock gets the caption even from Sony cameras.  However, I find that a pain to use.

Has anybody else noticed this, and found a workaround?

Generally, I find uploading to Istock to be more time consuming and bothersome than other sites.  As a result, I upload to them more sparingly, focussing on files that I think might sell better there.

Adobe has suddenly gone from accepting about 90% of what I submit to rejecting 80%, including many that I consider to be quite high quality, and not too similar to others.   There must be something going on with their review process.

When they do accept something, they sit on it thinking about it for about a week.

I have stopped uploading to them for the time being.  Might as well save up my files for when they are ready to accept them again.

Lostintimeline is quite right.  Unlike Adobe, technical rejections at SS say something like focus or noise, but on close examination there is no focus or noise problem in the photo, so the stated reason is useless.

For the last few months, Shutterstock has fallen to third place for me, well behind Adobe and even Istock, though my portfolio at SS is considerably larger.   It's not the level royalty calculation that did this, but the fact that most subscription sales are now 10 cents compared to 35 cents previously.  By the end of January, I will be at level four, but most sub sales are at 10 cents regardless of what your level is. 

If they ever explained the radical change for subscription sales, I missed it, but explanations are beside the point anyway.  The bottom line is that they are paying out a lot less.  They've suddenly gone from being one of the more generous payers to one of the worst.

As a result, I've paused in uploading to SS and I'm working on building out my Adobe portfolio, particularly in catching up with editorial (which I find is selling reasonably well there).  It will take years, but eventually buyers will notice that SS does not have as good a selection of new material as it used to.

My Istock for March was higher than March in either of the previous years, so no adverse impact from coronavirus so far.  Adobe is also quite good, including through April, while Shutterstock is somewhat weaker than usual.  It is possible that the other two are taking business from.

There are no doubt people working on long-term projects.  E.g., in March, I sold numerous fall season and Christmas-themed items.   The coronavirus impact will probably hit more gradually, with the weaker economy and weaker advertising, as these projects wind down.

I have to say I'm feeling quite pleased with Adobe recently.   Yesterday afternoon I took some nice fall color shots, and then uploaded them in the evening.

This morning, when I checked, they hadn't been reviewed yet.  The next time I checked my account, it was around noon to look at my sales.  One of the shots I took yesterday had already sold (for 0.99).   From pixels to pennies in less than 24 hours.