balajisrinivasan

So I guess it's time to say goodbye... It was nice talking to y'all.

Interesting. My approval rate was over 90 percent for pretty much the entire year before this recent cycle of rejections. So it had me wondering. And yeah, these delays have totally messed up my upload schedule too.

For all of my last 5 batches of 10-20 images, one image gets approved (usually the first) and the rest get rejected usually citing the same reason (Noise/Grain). Is this happening with everyone else along with the delays in approval? SS reviews have always been inconsistent but this is probably among the stranger ones.

Maybe they bought the cheapest, crankiest and the most sluggish AI they could find.

If it's a dashboard on your own website that you paid for, yes. But... the dashboard here is owned by Shutterstock and they can do whatever they want with it, whether we like it or not. It's not some private online sanctuary. Come to think of it, it makes perfect sense from a capitalist business perspective for SS to have ads on the dashboard to turn it into a profitable entity. Thousands of contributors go there every day. Google Adsense must love it.

Professionally shot model-released images of people of all ages in different environments working, laughing, eating and being active is generally most commercially viable. Landscapes, nature, wildlife and architecture don't usually do as well because the market is saturated with those images and unless your pictures are absolutely spectacular, they wouldn't stand out. That said, any image can sell well if you describe and keyword it accurately. My best sellers include an image of a tiger, a shopkeeper, the Taj Mahal, the Himalayas and a garbage bin. So anything can sell.

You can do your own captions and keywords. I upload all my images with my own metadata to WS. Their keywording service is quite terrible IMO. I only upload to the small agencies through WS. So the key advantage to me is the low payout threshold, which means you don't have to wait to hit 50 or 100$ on every individual agency and you get quicker and better payouts every month. Wirestock, along with AS, is the only agency/service which gives me a payout every month now without fail. I also like the Instapay option (even though I was skeptical about it initially) because some pictures make mo

Happens most days in India these days :/

Okay, of course, it's your port and you should do what you want without an idiot like me having an opinion about it. My point wasn't to fill a port with "bad quality" images but keep images that are just "okay" in because they might sell. It's more about usefulness than great imagery in stock photography. And an "okay" image that's useful will sell more often than a "great" image from my own limited experience.

I actually don't think that's a very good idea. What you think is a good image isn't necessarily what a buyer thinks is good. And sometimes buyers love your bad images. Some of my images that have sold over 10-20 times wouldn't be on my port if I did quality control. And keeping your worst images on your port isn't going to hurt your sales in any way. Customers buy images not portfolios.

Close to 25 percent on SS. Taking all agencies into account, the number is close to 40 because there's very little overlap between what sells here and what sells elsewhere for me.

Usually 20-30 good, accurate keywords do the job

Also, it's not about the number of images but the usefulness of the images. Of the 4500 images I have, only about 1300 have sold at least once. Which means the rest are just sitting there unsold and haven't found a use yet. If I had only 2000 images and all of them were useful and had sold, I would have made more. But it's not so easy for me to figure out what's useful. So I just throw everything I have and gamble.

That's a very good question. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that you get 10 cents for an image and you have to sell over 500 images a month to make payout. I also don't know what a "best-seller" means anymore. Is it 100 downloads? 50? 10? 20 dollars?

Joined October 2019. First payout Feb 2020. Then I increased my port and my minimum payout to 60$ and have had a payout every couple of months after. Would have had one almost every month if SS hadn't changed their payment structures.