Jane Rix

No worries! My only argument is with the spammers, but that's in Shutterstock's hands now, so I'm hoping that the problem will be gone soon and we'll all be competing on a level playing field.

I do agree, but I think the damage to contributors is that the mediocre images, that get on page one purely due to keyword spamming, do relegate better content to later pages. It's maybe not a good customer experience, so they give up after 2-3 pages and never reach the better content that's been pushed to pages 4, 5 or 6.

That's certainly the case on some of them, they are flipped and reprocessed images taken from other contributors. For the others, some are suspicious due to lack of information, as many have titles such as 'beautiful nature image of a waterfall', with no mention of the actual locations. Other look perfectly legitimate, other than the inclusion of the same keyword which, in some cases, it repeated up to 34 times in one image.

I hope so too, Sari, for all our sakes. I do a lot of nature and wildlife shots, so these actions have a direct impact on my earnings. It's tough enough for us all at the moment, so I'm not happy to see my income eroded by other people gaming the system in this way. Fair competition is one thing, but this is anything but fair.

OK, I've put together a list of 8 different contributors and provided portfolio and individual image links for each. The information has now been passed to Shutterstock, so I guess we will wait and see what happens. No doubt I could have found quite a few more examples if I kept looking, so if the initial report gets a response, then I'll consider spending a bit more time on finding others.

I also remember that Shutterstock took very swift action last time, so let's hope they do so again. As for editing after approval, it's a useful feature if you've missed something important or spot a spelling error, and I wouldn't want to lose it if it can be avoided. That said, given the choice, I would rather see a fair playing field for those who submit within the rules, as it's really difficult to compete in a search that inadvertently promotes spamming.

Thanks @Linda Bestwick & @Whiteaster, I guess it can't harm to raise the subject and report it again. I will send some details on to Shutterstock today and see what happens.

Agreed, Linda - I looked at Anne's forum post that she mentioned above, and this has been going on since at least last September when she noticed it. It's long enough to get several payouts, but also enough to stop other images rising up in the search, which is my real concern here.

Thanks, Anne - I'll take a look and link to it when I send an email in, as any additional examples are going to be helpful. Agreed, and I guess they get away with it by editing afterward, so that a reviewer doesn't see it at the submissions stage. I love that Shutterstock allows us to edit if necessary, but it does leave the door open for all sorts of abuse of the system, as per your example here. I guess the difference is that anyone looking for an image of Jameson’s Whiskey, probably isn't interested in a bottle of Absolute Vodka. However, in the last example I gave, 'forest[s

Thanks, Sari. I guess my best plan of acton will be to send over the information to Shutterstock. I don't suppose we have any active forum admins about do we?

Hi Sari - long time no speak I haven't been active here for quite some time, but I thought I'd pop in and ask around when I saw this. If this is intentional spamming, then it's working big time. They are relatively small portfolios but all high on the popular searches for each keyword, often with multiple images on page 1. I've come across 5 different contributors, and their whole portfolios are keyworded in the same way. Thanks, Former_Poster, yes - I've seen some odd translations going from non-English to English, but never this way around. I'm 99.999% sure that there is no wa

The first was 'canyon' and the second was 'waterfall'. I was looking to see how some of my own were placed in wide searches and checking which keywords appeared to be working well, (other than the obvious canyon or waterfall). That's when I stumbled across these examples, but some clicking around unearthed many more, and from several different contributors. I just did a quick search on 'forest', and turned this example up on the first page of the popular search: EDIT: Unsurprisingly, the same image is on page one of the popular search for 'lake'.

Thank you for checking, Studio 2, that's really appreciated. However, I wasn't actually referring to my own images. The above screenshots are examples that I found in the search, and are just two of many images that look similar in terms of keywords, (different contributors). I didn't want to post the links or contributor names, as I didn't want to imply that anyone was doing anything untoward. I don't know if this is blatant spamming or a bug, and was curious to see whether anyone else was seeing anything similar? We did have a case of this suddenly happening a few years back