Anna Shutterstock

Glad to see that some of you were able to download forms successfully. Our tech team has now resolved the issue affecting tax form downloads fully and there should be no further issues with downloading your 1099 forms. We once again apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused and thank you all for your patience.

Earlier today we released 1099 tax forms for US-based contributors who have received payments in 2019. Unfortunately we are currently experiencing an issue that is preventing those 1099 tax forms from successfully downloading. We are actively working on resolving this problem and we apologize for the inconvenience it may have caused. We thank you for your patience and ask that you attempt to download the form again at a later time. We will update this thread once we have a resolution in place.

In the coming days, the location field you already know from photo submissions will start to become available for all asset types. This field remains optional, and if entered, it will be considered by reviewers as part of the review process. The location you enter will not display to customers at this time, but will be used for creating localized search features for customers in the future.This field will be rolled out slowly to all contributors, so don’t worry if you don’t see it right away on your Submit page. Should you want to take advantage of this field for your content submissions, the same general guidelines apply as before, when this feature was launched for photos: Visual context: If you shoot the New York City skyline, the location would be New York, USA, even if the photo was taken from New Jersey. Metadata: If you enter the location to be Paris, France, be sure not to include other European cities like Barcelona, Rome, Copenhagen in your metadata. Property Release: If you opt to provide the location of the content and the property release shows Alexandria, Egypt, the location cannot be Cairo, Egypt. Again, location is part of the review process, so please be sure that the location does not contradict any of the above guidelines. We’ve partnered with Google to auto-complete locations based on the text entered. Specific building names and specific addresses are not supported. You can choose from listed entries in English only, free text entry is not supported. Be as specific as you can, selecting down to the region, town or even neighborhood, if one populates. As always, thanks for being a part of our contributor community and we look forward to your next submission!

Hi guys, We collected a number of questions about this partnership and put them together in this FAQ: How long has this deal been in place? The Fine Art America partnership went live in February 2019. We engage in new partnerships regularly, so we do not publically announce all of them. How are the images available on FAA selected? FAA has curated from Shutterstock’s entire collection. How much do I get paid? When an FAA customer orders an item with your image on it, you earn a percentage of the earnings that Shutterstock receives. The earnings are determined from the value of the whole item, including the frame, glass, etc. Your earnings percentage is based on your tier and will show up in the Single and Other column in the Earnings Summary. Do I get paid for every item? Or every order? If one of FAA’s customers buys two items with the same image, do I get two downloads? Yes. Customers purchase an object which incorporates your artwork, so each object produces a payout. For example, if an FAA customer buys 100 totebags, the contributor receives a payout for each of the 100 licenses. Who sets the price? FAA sets the price of the products available on their website. Can I opt out? No, participation in our partnership deals is part of the Shutterstock Contributor agreement (TOS). Why is Shutterstock offering the same images I have already posted on FAA? FAA curates their offerings from our whole collection and because Shutterstock represents your work in a non-exclusive basis, duplicate content is possible in a lot of situations, both here and with other places you may license your content. Please feel free to contact our support team if you have additional questions. Thanks!

We do take down similars from portfolios on a case-by-case basis. We audit the collection regularly now, but this stricter policy will enable us to prevent new overly similar content from coming in.

In order to improve the overall quality of the Shutterstock image collection, we are updating our policy for review of similar content. We avoid accepting Similar Content because it creates a poor user experience for customers and contributors by having large volumes of nearly identical images or clips. Browsing through large volumes of repetitive search results is time-consuming, and prevents customers from purchasing relevant content that fits their needs. We are outlining tighter guidelines for what we consider to be similar content and this policy will now also apply to footage submissions. You can review the details of the policy changes and check out visual examples in the Contributor Support article Why was my content rejected for Similar Content? This policy will go into effect starting on August 12, 2019. As a result of these stricter guidelines, some of you may encounter rejections of some types of content that was previously accepted. Please take the time to review explanations and examples provided in the support article and contact us if you have additional questions. And as always, thanks for your continued support and participation in our marketplace!

@Jane McIlroy you absolutely can use the tool simply to look up keywords without uploading content. Check out the Copy mode section here: https://www.shutterstock.com/contributorsupport/articles/en_US/kbat02/Portfolio-Tools-New-Keyword-Tool

Thanks to all of you who provided valuable feedback on our new keyword suggestion tool. The comments we collected from more than 30,000 contributors have helped us prioritize what improvements to focus on - and we’ll outline those below. With these improvements, we’re confident that we are supporting contributors’ workflows, and that we can remove the older keyword suggestion tool that was located outside the Submit page. In the next few days, we’ll be removing the old page, and replacing links to it with a link to the new tool. We’ve made the following improvements based on your feedback: Added a large Copy button to clarify that it’s easy to use the tool before you upload and to copy selected keywords for use outside Shutterstock Expanded search results to show 150 image or video thumbnails Added more keyword suggestions to choose from Replaced the + icon with the text “Add all” to highlight that all the most relevant keywords can be added with a single click Fixed spacing after the commas for ease of pasting into outside applications You can hover on the thumbnail of your content to see it larger In the future, we will also be adding reverse image and video lookup features. With this feature, we will compare your uploaded items with Shutterstock’s vast library to show you visually-similar search results. You won’t have to type in your search terms, and you’ll get even quicker access to suggested keywords. As always, please let us know if you have more ideas for how the tool could be further improved. Thanks!

We have confirmed that the uploading error issues that were affecting contributors over this past weekend have indeed been resolved. However, a number of you will continue to see this error: "We can't read what's in your file. Please re-save or re-export your file, and try uploading it again" and this is due to other legitimate validations that are in place at the time of upload. If you believe your file meets all the technical requirements for footage, but you continue receiving this error at upload, please contact our support team at submit@shutterstock.com and provide a copy of the file for us to review. You can upload the file to any file sharing provider like Dropbox or any other file sharing service from which our engineers can download and examine the file. Thanks for your patience and continued participation on our platform!

Thanks so much for bringing this to our attention! Our developers were able to identify and resolve the issue that was causing the upload failures. We apologize for the inconvenience this has caused and thank you for your patience. Please report any future occurrences of upload failures to our contributor care team at submit@shutterstock.com .

We have launched a new version of the Keyword Tool that lives directly on the Submit page. The old version of this tool forced you to navigate away from your content, but the new tool keeps everything in one place. You can use our new tool to either edit your uploaded content, or to copy keywords to paste anywhere outside of Shutterstock, like Lightroom, Bridge, or any other platform or application. Please take a look at the Portfolio Tools: Keyword Suggestion Tool article to learn more about this useful feature!

@Mark A. Williams thanks for bringing this to our attention. Our product team is looking into it and the problem should be resolved later today!

@ULD photo life thanks for bringing this to our attention. Our product team is looking into it and the problem should be resolved later today!

We have discovered some issues with auto-rasterization of vectors with anti-alias settings. Our product team is working on a solution to improve the quality of these rasters. While we are developing the solution for this issue, we will hold off on reviewing submissions that are affected, so some of you may see a longer than usual review time for your submitted vectors. Our engineers expect to have a fix in place very early next week. Thanks for your patience as we work on improving this process!

The Shutterstock API is a program that has existed for a number of years and has proved to be a successful avenue for additional earnings sources for our contributors. Our Partner and Sales teams work on developing new partnerships all the time, so we do not announce these developments to contributors, as it is a constant and on-going process. In response to all the questions that were raised in this thread, we created this article on our Support Center. Please take a look and feel free to contact us if you have additional questions. Thanks!