Sharkshock

this place is depressing AF!

I uploaded a revised W-9 form for taxes.............it was rejected for noise.

If you're going to be paid out 10 cents for your troubles, I suggest 10 cent effort: 1.) First, put your Canon or Nikon away. 2.) Thumb through some vacation photos from a few years back; the ones you took with your iPhone. 3.) Reduce the size to 6 or 7MP in Photoshop. 4.) Keyword sparingly. 5.) Upload a small handful and see if they're accepted. Rinse. Repeat.

SS will seem like a bar of gold compared to the couch change thrown at your feet by i-Stock.

You could fish for coins at the bottom of a fountain. Far less trouble than all the work you'll put in for 10 cents. There's also my Uncle Frank: He has this huge brown couch that looks terrible but there's probably loads of loose change within its cushions.

Hi Laura. So you've got a few things going against you if making money was your reason for joining: 1.) For starters, I agree with Steve's assessments above concerning image quality, subject, composition, lighting, etc. If someone asks if you're familiar with post processing software like Photoshop or LIghtroom, it's usually a polite way of saying your images need them. It's definitely not an insult though, as all of us started somewhere. I would add it helps to shoot in RAW + JPEG so you can have better control over your images. 2.) You have very few images in your portfolio. Maybe you're testing the waters to see if anything trickles in before uploading more? The way things are now, I would aim to submit around 1000 images. If they are successful it could lead to a monthly payout of maybe $5 - $10 which leads me to #3... 3.) Unfortunately SS has slashed contributors' royalties by a pretty steep margin. This has been discussed at great lengths already so I won't beat a dead horse talking about that. All I'll say is things have gotten so bad that many long contributors have packed up and left. Others have frozen their portfolios in hopes that commissions will be restored to reasonable levels. A good deal have stopped uploading anything new altogether. 4.) Rejections are simply ridiculous. Most of what you submit will most likely be rejected by AI for focus or noise regardless of the content. The advice around here used to be to resubmit a few days later and "voila". I don't know what kind of free time you have on your hands but It'd probably be better spent doing something else: cutting grass, driving for Uber or Lyft, delivering pizzas. You'd make more money simply asking strangers for cash at a gas station. This used to be a place where you could make a nice bit of income.......enough to make you want to keep uploading. Today it's a depressing collection of contributors who've had the rug yanked out from underneath them. A place full of memories. Imagine being 30 minutes late for a huge department meeting. Your an entire department has learned their positions have just been eliminated in a merger. The boss you've been so chummy with for years is nowhere to be found. Some have already stormed out of the conference center in anger. Most of them have sad looks on their faces as they stand in a long line to collect severance/stockholder packets. A few can't hide the tears of agony running down their cheeks. Yesterday they all had jobs. They had vacations planned. They talked about the weekend's best games in the break room. Retirements to look forward to. Kids' high school graduations. Weddings too. And now it's all over.......just like that. Imagine walking in on that. This is what SS is like today.

You'd be surprised by how many people aren't aware of what it means to shoot on private property or public. I've been told many times over the years to put my gear away when they, in fact, had no right. Private property in most instances is certainly off limits. Where things get muddy is when someone who appears to have some sort of authority believes they are correct in asking you to leave. Example: A local mall decked to the nines for Christmas. Everyone inside with their phones out happily snapping pictures of decorations, taking selfies, photographing kids on santa's lap. All fine and good. But a stock photographer doing the same thing? Well, clearly he's either a pervert or a violator of some kind. Surely a security guard will come up to you and ask you to leave, regardless of your intentions. Drone photographers are frequently harassed or told to leave by officials who simply state "private property, you have to go now" even though the photographer is abiding by all the rules. Similar scenario with tripods: who gets to use them and where. (and who decides?) One night security allows you to shoot near the Louvre with a tripod and the next you're asked to put it away. Different people interpret the rules differently or just enforce what they think the rules should be. How you choose to handle this is another story. If you're in the right, you can present some form of documentation in your defence when confronted. It's usually easier to simply pack up and go somewhere else though.

hopefully you got your 10 cents.

In the uncropped image there's a small shrub that's out of focus in the foreground. That's usually enough to be automatically disqualified these days.

Sometime last year I uploaded about 300 photos (some of which were best sellers) to see how they did. The downloads came but just pennies for your troubles. As others mentioned, they have 2 extremely annoying features that make uploading there a complete waste of time: 1. Any photo with a human being seems to require a model release, whether it's an arm, a person in a bokeh background, the back of a head, etc. It will all be rejected. 2. The stupid keyword guessing game is beyond dumb whose function seems hellbent on wasting contributors' time. Enter "girl" and it wants to have you choose "girls". Enter "friend" and it wants you to choose "group of friends". No thanks.

~20% less. If it weren't for 2 big sales at the end of the month it would've been worse.

I've made more with AS than SS consistently over the last 6 months. It's remarkable despite far fewer images and the limitations of Illustrative Editorials.

Use the clone stamp tool in PS to remove the swoosh logo from those Nikes and that should take care of editorial rejection.

go get your bucket!!! there's loose pocket change to be had!

you must be new here..... the faster you upload images the faster they can be rejected. This frees up your day to do other things like wipe your nose. Feed the cat. Take a nap. Any of these things are worth more than the 10 cents SS now pays out.

I wrote this in another thread: If the commission is 10 cents, put in 10 cents worth of effort. For some this may result in uploading 1 photo a month. Maybe nothing. It's painfully obvious by now that one of SS's goals is to limit/decrease the size of their library. Contributors that buy into the "feed the beast" mentality are certainly welcome to upload heavily sanitized images (often multiple times) in hopes some will make it past the rejection firewall. Personally, 10 cents isn't worth the time it takes to fire up photoshop.

Of course it does. "The house always wins."

They blocked me too from their facebook page. Guess they got mad I called them out for their laughable "OMG Everyone!!! Look how WOKE we are!!!" BS posts.

Microstock has steadily trended downward for years. As long as there are people willing to sell their photos for pennies on the dollar SS will continue to pay slaves' wages. Yesterday it was 38 cents. Today it's 10 cents. Tomorrow 4 cents? Maybe a bowl of soup. I think it's only a matter of time before AS does something similar. Anyway Shutterstock's door is always open for kids with iPhones, beginners, hobbyists, and desperate people from developing countries. I think this is where they're headed in the future.

That comes pretty close to summing up my involvement in stock

I think we can play SS's game by looking at this from a different angle. By drastically slashing already low commissions surely SS doesn't expect the same effort from its contributors. Let's think outside the box! For those choosing to stick this out I have some submission suggestions: 1. Smartphone pictures- Scan that iPhone for passable material and submit it in your free time! Maybe you have an old iPhone in a drawer somewhere from a few years back. Surely there are images that could be accepted! 2. Entry level DSLR- I'm not talking about the camera in your bag right now. (Save those images for AS) I'm talking about the entry level Canon Rebel you practiced with years ago. The Nikon D3100 gathering dust in your storage closet. Head to Amazon and purchase some memory cards and a battery for it! 3. Existing RAW files- If you insist on submitting images using your current DSLR submit the minimum resolution. 5 megapixels, maybeeeee 6? By reducing the file size you also reduce the chance your submission will be rejected for grain or focus. 4. Post process- Make sure your editing efforts are brief as possible. Don't worry too much about color.....creative agencies can adjust that themselves. Exposure is more important. If visible dust is on the sensor, simply scrap it and move onto another file. 5. Contribute less- If your time is worth 10 cents, by all means, "feed the beast". Ask yourself if you'd be willing to spell check legal documents for a $1 payout per document. If the answer is NO, consider decreasing contributions to SS. This not only frees up time you could use to be productive but spares SS the hassle of hosting millions of files.

I've been on fineartamerica/pixels.com for maybe 5 1/2 years now. It's a place to host some of my images for my website and sell the occasional prints but not a significant source of income. The yearly fee pays for itself some years....sometimes it doesn't. Just my experience. I think those searching for an income stream to make up for SS's recent bag over the head will be deeply disappointed.

I was thinking the same thing. Leave SS to "teach them a thing or two". Then join a nobody stock site that's invisible to search engines and customers alike.... 🤨

I'm sure it'll be rejected....................for focus or noise.