Just wanted to see if anyone had any insight on this - there's a photo I recently submitted - let's say it's a photo of a flower. I submit it, along with about 30 other photos (mix of commercial and editorial). Only THIS photo gets reviewed immediately - and immediately gets swiftly rejected due to "noise" (uh huh....  ) The other photos stay in the queue and are later reviewed.

I see the rejection and get irritated lol, so I re-submit the photo of the flower. Again, immediately rejected for noise. For kicks, I submit some more photos. Those photos sit in the queue as they should.

I try it a third time - again, immediately rejected.

Anyone know what's going on here? It's so weird. It's just this one particular photo.

This kind of review behavior started already a few months ago: My images now always get reviewed in 2 "batches". I can submit for example 10 images and 4 will be reviewed at one point, and the other 6 at another time. Some think that the faster review is an AI review, though I doubt that. An AI review would still not take hours. But maybe there is still an AI involved in the review, by pre-sorting the images for rerview and there are two different review teams. Maybe a standart one that gets the images where the AI can't auto-detect any problems with things like focus or noise and the ones where the AI fails to make an assessment go to a more experienced review team? This is of course all pure speculation. All I can say for sure is that commercial images submitted get devided into two different review processes now, like it has always been for editorial and commercial images, but now there is a second commercial images category.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/1/23191214/paypal-friends-and-family-payments-business-accounts

Could this PayPal change have anything to do with the fees being imposed?

I don't think so. I doubt Canva would have sent payment to contributors through the friends & family feature for years. It would have been a violation of Paypal ToS and they had nothing to gain from it as the fee is to be paid by the recipient.

I always wondered why there were no fees actually, same as with other agencies. That's how PayPal makes their money after all.

I regularly upload content and I still get mainly 10 / 12 cent DL's, so I doubt that's a factor. Might be different if you haven't uploaded in a while. Maybe SS wants to "reward" you for coming back and motivate you to keep uploading? Who knows. Could all just be coincidence as well.

Why all this negative criticism of Russia?

Probably because Russia is trying to invade another country?

And no, I'll not jump on your whataboutism bait. Doesn't change anything.

These are current news editorial images, yet the whole batch have been rejected for not meeting editorial guidelines.

Adobe does not accept current news editorial image, they only accept illustrative editorials or their very own definition of it I don't understand half of the time.

Don't want to make a new thread just because of this: Anyone else can already see their August earnings on Canva? Because mine say I've earned $0.03  (plus the individual sales I could see before) in August and there is absolutely no way this can be correct. 

You need to study harder 

And once again you have replied to me without bothering to read what I wrote. Simple images like the one you posted result in mostly correct results. The more details I add, the more the dogs get zombified. But I already wrote that.
Try for yourself.  Describe this image to DELL and look at your results.
https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/dogs-christmas-costumes-two-french-bulldogs-1850738611

I dare everyone who seems so impressed with DALL to do the same.

 If you don't want zombies, use something like cute

First and only try on your Bulldog.

I can only repeat the exact same answers I wrote above already:
If you only tried Bulldogs once, you don't have much to draw conclusions from.
If I use cute, I get zombies.

And since you apparently reply before reading, just repeating your original statement and this conversation is going in circles, this is pointless and I am out of here.

I am very sure that AS changed the algorithm on August 1.

If they did that, then it was (finally!) in my favor. My download numbers have increased. I had more than double as many sales in August 22 than in August 21. Maybe I will finally get to see the glourious Adobe takeover compared to Shutterstock that everyone keeps talking about.

Today I had the chance to try out DALL E and I started out by describing some of my bestsellers and see what my AI generated "competition" would be.

I can now safely say that it is how I thought: We are really really still FAR away from having to worry about AI generated photos replacing us.

Tricking AI and then saying it's flawed by giving the input poor definitions, isn't really proving anything.

But maybe this does: One of the descriptions I gave was " Two French Bulldogs with one wearing full body snowman costume and one wearing full body christrmas tree costume next to gift boxes" ( I tried to describe this image: https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/dogs-christmas-costumes-two-french-bulldogs-1850738611 )
In none of the results any of the dogs was wearing a christmas tree or a snowman costume. DALL E gave me a Christmas elf and santa costume instead. In one of the results the French Bulldog was replaced with a creepy looking plush dog.

Another example I tried was  "French Bulldog wearing full body devil costume with pitchfork" ( I tried to describe this image https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/french-bulldog-dog-red-halloween-devil-1822964279 )
None of the results gave me a full body costume. The dogs were wearing devil horns and had a pitchfork that floated weirdly in the air in front of them.

But the worst of all is that in all results DALL E gave me dogs that looked like Zombies with parts of their faces like eyes missing or eyes melting off their faces or with strangely twisted legs. The results weren't just bad. They were scary.
Also, the single elements of the images often were not put together well. Look at the strangely pasted pirate hat in the example below. It's not looking realistic at all.
Even the simple instruction "French Bulldog on white background" isn't producing the desired results.  First round of results I get dogs on white blankets with lots of folds in the fabric in all results, even though that's not what I asked for. Second round I suddenly got French Bulldogs on a white background like I asked, but in one of 4 results the head of the dog was not in the picture and the other 3 had melting zombie eyes again. In all results the dog was strangely placed in the picture, with body parts being cut off.
At this point I had seen enough nightmare material and tried for something harmless: "Leaf of Monstera Deliciosa Variegata plant". No result showed me a variegated version of the plant like I asked for. Next search for "Leaf of Philodendron Verrucosum plant" showed me two results of random Philodendon plant leaves, not belonging to a Verrucosum, one Monstera and one Epipremnum leaf. The AI obviously hasn't learned a thing about botany.

So, after having tried this out for myself I feel pretty assured in my original statement. We are not there yet. I don't even know where all the great examples that were used for advertising this came from, I couldn't produce one single usable result. At this state this product shouldn't even have been released for beta testing with the results it gives.

Scary zombie dogs:

Quote from: Firn on August 19, 2022, 06:15

Quote from: Roscoe on August 18, 2022, 09:49

 Hard work beats talent (if talent doesn't work hard)

From my personal experience, with microstock, sheer luck beats talent and hard work. Might not have been the case when the selection of images was more limited, but now with millions of images for competition, it's mostly a matter of luck to have the right image at the right time displayed somewhere.

This one sold for around $100:
https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/orange-industrial-transportable-dumpster-container-1668704380

I  still have some images where I put lots of work into where I seem to have been able to produce something that is in high demand and the images sold hundreds of times. But even "hundreds of times" can, in worse case scenario, still mean like $50 only. For me it's rarely the images that are in high demand and sell in large quantities that bring in the money. It's the ocassional high amount sales that make the difference between a good month and a bad month on Shutterstock and these, at least for me, are often really random. I really can't attribute having earned $100 from a very random photo of a very random industrial dumpster, that took me literally 3 seconds to take, 0 seconds to post-process and under 10 seconds to keyword to "hard work" or "talent". Anyone who follows the minimum image quality standards of Shutterstock could have made, uploaded and sold an image like this. All it needed was luck.

I agree with you, luck is probably quite a big factor in the game nowadays.
But don't you think that hard work increases your chances in having that luck?

Hard work can be producing a lot of content, which increases your chances on having more occasional big sales of rather random shots like you had, or having an unintentional best-seller of a rather generic subject.
 
Hard work can be producing higher quality images, which also increases your chances of getting images actually sold on a very regular basis.

Or hard work can be analyzing the market trends and gaps in the database and start shooting that.

Or combining all of that together.

Whether the hard work is worth the returns is of course a completely different story

Yes, of course hard work, and also talent, plays a role. I don't doubt that. As said, there are images where I invested a large amount of work and time and some of them sell regularly - And across all agencies, counting together the sum, of course they also bring in a decent amount of money over time. But when I just sell my "regular" sellers within a month, my income is my "regular" income as well. Because of the time and effort I put into my photos that "regular" income might be much better than someone else's income, who just snaps a few photos without any real effort. But it's the big sales that make a difference between my average "regular" monthly earnings and a really great month. These big sales have a much bigger impact on my earnings and these are almost always really random photos that do not sell regularly at all, that's why I attribute them to the luck factor.

I am not sure I am getting across what I am trying to say so well. I am convinced that spending time and effort, not only into taking photos and videos, but also into doing research to determine what could sell well and also talent pays off and plays a role in microstock and helps you have a decent income.
 But this is a thread about high price photo and video sales and, at least for me, very specifically these sales rarely seem to be the ones connected to effort and work, but more to luck.

There is no need to put the word "transparent" in your title or keywords if that is what you mean.

No, that's not what I mean. It's not me. It's Adobe that automatically puts the word "transparent" into the keywords when uploading a  png.  Sure, I could remove the keyword again, but apparently Adobe seems to think it should be there and since - once the feature is actually launched - I want people to actually find my pngs I don't see why I should remove this relevant keyword after Adobe added it. But as of now that means that Adobe automatically adds the keyword "transparent" to images that, at least for now, are not transparent. And that's very misleading to customers.

Mat, something just occured to me - I submitted some png files and today one of them was sold. But if these images are now not sold as transparent pngs, but jpgs to the customers, isn't it highly misleading to them, when they have "transparent" in title and keywors? At least the keyword "transparent" is automatically filled in by adobe when submitting a png file. Wouldn't it be better to hide them from customers alltogether, till Adobe is ready to launch them as pngs instead of selling them as jpgs while claiming they were transparent?