Firn

That's rubbish. His title is "Red Grouse Male in heather" and while it's a bit short and not very descriptive (I would probably pick something like "Side view of male Red Groude bird in purple heather field in full bloom on blurry background"), there is nothing wrong with it. What you are referring to is the file name. A file name will always include the file type extension like jpg, you can't just remove it and it has no relevance to Shutterstock. It's not view-able to customers and it's a file name, not a title.

I don't have it?

I had a phase, sometime last year, where I would get images with botanic names rejected quite often (and not all plants have Latin names. Especially plants that were bred as houseplants and don't appear naturally sometimes have weird made up name endings, like the original plant's Latin name + some fancy sounding suffix). I then started to put these names in quotation marks. Even though they are special characters too, I didn't have problems with the names anymore ever since.

That's what I meant. My port has only about half the size, but around 400 sales each month. No matter how often people want to tell the opposite - the size of the port alone is not any kind of achievement on its own and does not matter. It only matters if you have a variation of subjects to go with it.

I think whether that's a good achievement or not depends solely on the content of your portfolio. Filling your port with 10000 mostly unique photos in 2 years is quite the achievement. Filling your port with 10000 similars is not. I think your port is a mixture of both. You do have good unique photos, but you also have a very high number of repetitive topics. For example, you have over 800 photos of highwas / expressway taken from bridges in your port. It's not that hard to add a great number of photos to your port if you keep shooting the same topic that's easily available to everyone. I could go to the forest and photograph 100 trees or leaves in a day. Then I would have 10000 photos in my port in a little bit over 3 months. Now, thinking of thousands of different subjects to photograph, that's a challange. I would be interested in knowing how many photos you sell each month, because I suspect that, compared to a port with only half as many photos with less repetive topics, I think it might not be more.

Maybe the reviewer hit the wrong button. Proper rejection reason for this should be "Image is too similar".

Ah, don't be confused by the titel "Additional resources". I don't know why they call it like this, but actually it is just a link to the Shutterstock blog - and that is aimed at all kinds of people, contributors, customers, photographers, influencers, etc. If you look at the blog itself, you will see that the individual articles have tags like "Business", "Contributor", "Tips & Tutorial" or "Video Production". Most are tagged with "Contributor", but I can't really remember that there were many that contained useful information for contributors. These are just blog posts by random people - no idea on what base they get picked or whether anyone on Shutterstock actually checks the content, It's not only that very often they do not contain useful tips, but very often the examples that are picked are photos that would not be accepted on Shutterstock, so I am not sure why I should trust anyones advice who can't even select images that would be approved by Shutterstock? I remembre photos that contained visible graffiti (neither accepted as commercial not editorial by Shutterstock), that looked extremely similar (look at the first and the 6th photo - I know I would get thes rejected as "too similar. I had images rejected that were clearly different, while this one looks like almost the same image! https://www.shutterstock.com/blog/photographers-stock-homeschool-images ) or photos that showed polaroids (again, not accepted by Shutterstock). These are just some things I remember noticing at once from the top of my head, but I am sure there are many more examples if I looked out for these. What good are tips and examples to me, if Shutterstock judges its contributors by different standards and I know that I as a small minion would not get images like this approved or that the tips come from someone who might have no experience in selling images on stock sites?

The camera paranoia. I think we have all experienced it. Last year I was taking photos at out local Cristmas market. Totally harmless, right? I was not even photographing people, mostly focusing on the decorations on the roofs. And here is the funny thing: Basically EVERYONE around me was taking pictures, only with their phone and no one was bothered by this at all. But take photos with a real camera and people seem to get all paranoid. I was asked what I was doing multipe times (Eh? Taking photos? Like everyone around me?) and a guy outright told me he was worried I was taking photos for planning a terrorist attack. Yeah, right. I don't know how photos of christmas decorations on rooftops would help me with that, but even if I planned something like this, I would rather use my cell phone to take photos inconspicuously, because no one bothers about that. It's actually one of the reasons why I was thinking about getting a press photographer pass, just so I could shove it in people's faces and tell them "I'm, press" and be done with the pointless discussions. But press passes cost yearly fees and aren't really worth anything, as no real "official" photographer's press pass exists in Germany. It's all from private organization and with 0.10$ an image it's not really worth it to invest money into that (or anything else for that matter).

Had one of these too. 🤮

No, Shutterstock does not accept photography that was post-processed in a way that causes the image to have technical errors like grain, noise or artefacts. There is also no category for this. If you manage to edit a photography in a way that it looks like a painting, you can submit it as illustration, but your example is not suitable for this. It still looks like a photo with extreme technical flaws.

Looking at the numbers Alexandre kindly provided ( 1222$ from Arcangle in July, 139$ on Shutterstock) I am not sure Arcangle is the agency that should be avoided here. 😕

My favourite one is actually the one shown as example for "Authentic photos". What woman does not run pantsless through grainfields? So authentic!

They have always required an editorial caption, so if you were able to submit them without one in the past, that's where the mistake was made. https://www.shutterstock.com/blog/submitting-editorial-content-part-1-illustrative-editorial

I can't recall Shutterstock claiming the new earning structure would benefit contributors. Even they did not dare to try to sell us such a lie. They said it would "create fair opportunities for all our contributors" - by "fair" meaning that everyone strats from scratch each year, so has the same chance at low commission rates -, and "reward performance with greater earnings potential", meaning, exactly what is written. You will be rewarded with the potential to earn more, not actually with a higher monthly income. It's like saying "If you play the lottery, you have the potential to become a millionaire". Sure, you can possibly earn more than what you would have earned before on individual sales if you are lucky, but these sales are so rare, that in no way they make up for the 90% of sales that earn you less money than what they would have earned you before. At least that's how it is for me. Most of my sales are 0.10-0.20$ now. From time to time I will get a ODD that is 3 or 4$, but even most ODDs are lower than what I used to get for them before.

No, I guess in that case the person 'organizing' the 'event' would be the person riding on the horse. I know it's all stupid, but I also kind of understand where this is coming from: For reviewers, in most cases, it is impossible to see whether someone doing sports was doing it alone for fun, or whether it's a shot from some kind of event, so they go by "better safe than sorry" and reject most photos of anyone doing sports.