Still want to point out there is grey area (or as Mat said earlier 'borderline').  For example, this is an image rejected couple of months ago -- world famous Hotel Del Coronado in San Diego, filming location of "Some Like It Hot" movie with Marilyn Monroe



However yesterday I had download of https://stock.adobe.com/ca/stock-photo/id/390299575, accepted as IE last year.  Same Hotel Del Coronado, this time with garden and sign. 


As general rule I will not submit architecture as IE to Adobe, but again it is not always clear cut & probably will depend from reviewer to reviewer.

So what I think/guess, that Connect is: a high volume of low volume usage.
At least, that's my interpretation of my connect sales.
I might be wrong of course.

No, you nailed it.  But whatever you want to call it, it is disrespectful.  Bottom line

And if you captioned a "crowd waiting to see Emmanuel Macron after he was returned as French President", that could show up on a search for Macron, even though he isn't in the image.

Yes, and that is main reason for "false positives".  It is direct consequence of fact they index the Caption. Because it is impossible to know what should be treated as phrase since Caption is array of words. 

Different scenario is of course with tags where you can directly specify what is the phrase, and what is single indexable word.   

It is important to be aware of the above for optimal metadata specification.  I suspect most people don't fully understand this, or simply don't bother.

I actually find Dreamstime compensation model fairly well worked out. Main problem is lack of sales, directly caused by years of total absence of any QA, which completely flooded the libraries with sub-standard content, similar, spammed metadata etc

Yes to that all except for Alamy rank, which may be imaginary.

Alamy Rank is very real.  Click Through Rate (CTR) is just one of factors in play, they won't disclose others but sale frequency/amount likely comes into play as well.  Reason I love CTR False Positives concept is because it effectively fights keyword spamming.  Put the word donkey into image of polar bear, fine.  But when it gets returned in searches nobody will zoom it, thus lowering your Alamy Rank & impacting future sales.

Could be worth posting on their Forum;  it is generally dead, but questions like this will get answered by one of their Admins

0.35s here as well, with one 2.00 and one 4.49

It is very simple.  If you look whole Alamy you will get overall trends, but there will be lots of data.  I generally look at my own more.  Consider attached file

Search Term tells you keywords customers were searching for. Important to note: Not ALL customers, only registered ones
Your Views tells you how many (my) images were returned for this search term
Sessions not really useful, you can ignore
Your Zooms Very important!  Tells you that how many times customer actually clicked (zoomed) my image.  If >0, it is good - means it picked their interest. This is potential sale;  sometimes sales get reported some time after the zoom. 
Your Sales Self explanatory
Your CTR - Click Through Rate - number of zooms / divided by number of views x 100.  CTR brings up  Alamy Rank - the more zooms, the higher the rank - means images are sorted higher in customer searches
Total Views Total number of images, including mine, that were returned for given Search Term.  Basically tells how many images I was competing against for that search term
Total CTR Total CTR for given search term.  If 0, it means customer really didn't find anything interesting


So for instance in my example, for search term "Kilimanjaro Summit" I had 2 images returned,  1 was zoomed, none sold, click-through was 50 (1 / 2 x 100), Total 100 images were returned across whole Alamy, of which 4 were zoomed with CTR of 4.  So I did fairly well,  customer zoomed at 4 images out of 100, and 1 was mine.

The most useful column by far is Search Term. You see what customers are looking for.  Then you think "Wait, I have such photo - why was it not returned in search?" You go to Alamy Image Manager, find the photo and see that maybe you forgot some of words in Search Term. Of toggle it to super keyword, Etc.

Or, on the other hand, you can identify "False Positives" - your image was returned but it is not at all representative for search term.  Naturally, it will not be zoomed, and thus bring down CTR and Alamy Rank. So you go to Image Manager and remove or at least adjust again the keywords.

Thanks for the updated image ID. That ghost town image is now online in the Illustrative Editorial collection. This particular shot is in a bit of a gray area as far as branding is concerned, but you captioned it well so it's live. Everyone should keep in mind that the Illustrative Editorial Collection is not simply a place to upload your for unreleased content that doesn't qualify for the commercial collection. Just because there aren't people in it, doesn't make it eligible for IEC. Every submission should have a strong branding element.

thanks,

Mat Hayward

Thank you Mat; photo is online now indeed.  I am not blowing Adobe horn, but this is what separates you from others - being reasonable, and actually listening online.  Try something like this with Shutterstock AI rejections, good luck

I think I have now solid grasp on what constitutes Adobe IEC material & in general will  submit something from "gray area" only if I feel it has enough end customer potential.   Thanks again

What's the image number on the ghost town image? It looks to me like it may be appropriate for IEC. I'll be happy to take a look.

-Mat

File ID: 492100473
Original name: virgin1.jpg

(Thanks a lot Mat.  Again, not about the photo, but rather about figuring what is exactly illustrative editorial by AS criteria)

...

Thank you for great explanation as always Mat
Can I please ask you to elaborate on this one though.   This was rejected:


There are no logos/brands, but it is private property - replica of old west frontier town in Virgin, USA at doorstep of Zion National Park.  It can be newsworthy - travel industry, cultural heritage, etc

On the other had, this was accepted (and has several downloads, thank you very much):


Plaza De Las Artes in San Jose, Costarica.  Conceptually I don't see any difference between these 2 images;  which illustrative editorial aspect Costarica photo has that Zion doesn't?

I am not trying to push Zion image through - I'd simply like to learn something in order not to waste time of your QA next time.  Thanks

I'll say what I posted in other thread:   First and foremost you must enjoy photography and not do it only for monetization purposes.  Otherwise you will just end up frustrated.  And yes, like others said, there is still $$ to be made; demand has not decreased. You only need different strategy;  expecting "sales" from micros that pay 10 cents or 15% only means devaluing your own work.

Actually my experience is they don't accept residential houses as "illustrative editorial".  Public landmark architecture is ok, but private property not

This one ok


This one not ok ("Unfortunately, during our review we found that this file does not meet the Adobe Stock�s Illustrative Editorial Guidelines")