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.

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?

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?

There was this "faved" feature which was renamed to "followed" if I remember correctly. You could choose some of your images and they were supposed to get better rankings in the search. Now I can't find the feature anymore, it was under "sell images". Have you ever used it and did it help? Is it really gone or am I missing something?

Thanks!