Perhaps they are moving new client contracts or advertising already to istock/getty even before the merger?

I have noticed that on Pond5 many of my files, even old hd files, have been priced much higher and added to the premium collection. hd for 139 usd.

Some clips are being priced lower at 35, but other new clips are 119/135.

This is good, because now at least some of my work will be visible if customers search through premium files.

I still have very few clips up, only 1100 files after 14 years. Shame on me.

Very good summary of the situation and very polite and restrained.

I feel like there has been a shift somewhere at Adobe towards the contributors. Not from the mods and team directly working with us.

Somewhere higher up in the chain someone has decided we are just useless little creator ants, probably soon to be replaced by ai software completely and our experience and frustrations don't matter at all.

But we are all also clients of Adobe, we use Adobe software, we pay for subscriptions and: we recommend Adobe to clients and friends as a good place to buy stock from. A company that has the reputation of treating the community fairly.

However, this feeling of being in a win win for everyone involved system is now broken.

Random roulette rejections make no sense. Not for the buyers who are missing out on useful content, not for creators and especially not for the designers who are uploading project contents as stock to offset some of the costs of Adobesubscriptions or buying stock.

How long until the mass frustration leads to people cancelling Adobe software subscriptions? Or moving stock contracts to a mix of istock and dreamstime?

istock anyway has much better search results if sorted by newest. I was suprised to discover that a search for people/newest on Adobe leads me to isolated watermelons, croissants, spa images, simple flowers and not enough variety of  people.

Please talk to us?

What happened???

The creator community will also happily assist in any beta testing projects.

These portfolios are part of our lives and business. We rely on the money to feed our families. This is not a hobby, real costs for rent, healthcare, schools is being paid with stock income.

Please fix this very, very serious issue.

Look at what happened to Shutterstock after they "broke up" with the creator community 3 years ago.  What happened to them and their stock price??

The creator community might be millions, but we are not idiots. We put our support behind agencies that treat us well.

Adobe was probably the best of them all lately (with exceptions of smaller places like Dreamstime or walled garden agencies like stocksy)

Well, very tiny uploads compared to you...but more sales...

I will try to upload a little more, perhaps 2 videos a day

Everybody has to draw their own conclusions.

Stock needs to be refreshed every year. New trends in visual styles, colors, technology, food trends.

New trends in social themes and changes in society.

If I put my buyers hat on, I would be desperate for much more variety and content.

Agencies provide "streams" of fresh content, not an absolute number of content.

it is about a dynamic marketplace that is self organizing.

Creators, at least those that succeed, are tiny entrepreneurs that learn a great deal about their target customer group.

They provide a lot more detailed content than macrostock editors could ever think off.

A gigantic volume of content is missing, especially anything localized.

Agencies only have 1 billion images and still less than 60 million videos.

That is nothing.

How many professions exist around the world? How many detailed processes are done in these professions? How much has been systematically documented or produced for stock?

Even just a theme like soups of the world? How many are missing? And how many complete recipes have been produced step by step including videos?

The more you dig into collections, the more you see how mich is missing.

Maybe sunsets, flowers have too many duplicates but even just handshakes have a crazy amount missing.

With my buyers eyes, the agencies are empty, especially when it comes to systematic story telling.

But...to each their own...if you cannot see the unbelievably large amount missing, then moving on is probably the best you can do.


However the Adobe roulette algo declines are a crazy outlier that makes no sense. But it is good for getty and the coming merger, adobe will certainly lose clients over this.

Stock agencies are empty for me. I wish I had more time to create more.

eta

And agencies are part of the overall creative community. It is all about humans.

All the customers are humans, no ai bots buying content. The creators, even those creating with ai are humans, the agencies have a human sales team, human editors, human marketing people.

It is all about human needs. Robots don't need stock photos.

Having a great community vibe and support is good for business.

Look at what happened to SS after they closed their forums and gave a big FU to all creators.

No matter how many agencies they tried to buy, the content kept running away after their takeovers and the buyers left.

Because the uploadstreams determine were the clients go. Nobody will pay for a stock subscription to a place that treats them badly, because producers and buyers are the same community.

The very abrupt change to random ai reviews is a very serious problem and I have never seen anything like it in 20 years of doing stock.

So complaining about abrupt changes with no real communication or feedback is perfectly sensible.

Also the only way to make them understand that we are displeased and this is not an acceptable situation.

So keep complaining, nothing about these abrupt roulette reviews is normal.

Quote from: pires128 on May 04, 2025, 03:48

raul only post stuff and run lol. and his job is to make good contact with contributors.

agreed.  Raul might even be AI bot

Also what happened to Michelle, she was fantastically helpful and seems to have disappeared from discord.

I like Raul a lot, but I understand that he must be very frustrated. With random reviews, you can no longer advise creators, or look for problems in a file.

If acceptance suddenly goes from 90% to 10% but you do a search by newest and see all kinds of crap coming in, there is nothing you can say.

He cannot complain in public about Adobe, but he what is happening is wrong.

Surprised he is still there. The community is spiraling downwards and adobe is telling them it is all their fault.

I would also interpret lack of adobe mods engagement as a bad sign that worse things are coming.

They have doubled down that creators are at fault. They are perfectly fine with an unhappy creator community, which I find very weird.

A simple stern upload limit would have easily stopped uploading mass duplicates and in combo with normal quality reviews, most problems would have been solved.

Moved up a bit on ultralow sales. pos 5180

@pacesetter

Thank you for sharing your video results. Always important to remember the power of videos.

Very depressing news.

Adobe has made it official that they prefer the ai spammers.

They have removed the upload limits, so you can read people boasting how they upload 20k files a week to Adobe.

At the same time they are now using a random roulette review algo that is declining files with no logic.

Also affecting many ports with no ai, who only upload camera content.

They could have implemented simple upload limits, instead prefer the spammers.

I will now focus more on camera video and camera photo and also more on other agencies.

This is certainly an opportunity for istock to win creators back.

They still have a normal human review and sensible quality control.

pos 4740

going down fast

this is the result of not being able to upload fresh content. it will get worse if i cannot learn how to get content accepted again.

So, easter is over, all the way down I go. pos 3760

This is also the beginning of the upload chaos on adobe. If I cannot add files and grow my port I am invisible in the newest search.

Look at it this way: winter holiday content uploaded now has a lot less competition.

And the buyers looking now are the really interesting ones, that might also have a bigger enterprise budget or perhaps would buy with an extended license.

6 weeks before the event there is a lot more competition and it is hard to be seen.

Glad to hear your strategy is working.

But I see no difference in decline complaints between camera and ai.

I did a test with an ugly and probably unsellable ai easter illustration. That was accepted in 2 days.

Now I will try other more ugly content to see if it can get through.

My camera images are still in review, so are my test videos.