10 tips for photographers in order to get accepted by ShutterStock

Hi,
I submitted 10 photos to shutterstock last week(first time) and all 10 were rejected. Two of the 10 were marked with „re-submit“--one was a couple (needed a model release), the other was a close-up of a child. None of the photos were Photoshopped.

I only have a digital Lumix (Panasonic) 10× Zoom, and a Canon digital, can't afford a SLR yet. Have traveled quite a bit and have about 15,000–20,000 photos--all of which are, of course, not submittable, but some are good.

Question: Should I re-submit the two that were labeled as such along with 8 new ones? Thanks for your help. je

Hello,

I've been trying to get into Shutterstock for more than a year. I've submitted 6 times now.
I gave myself a pause of 6 months in order to get better.
But one thing which I absolutely don't understand is that for the last 4 submissions, I get 7 out of ten accepted, but previously accepted photos subsequently get knocked down. I could be accepted twice will all the different shots which were initialy accepted and eventulally rejected.
I'm baffled.

I made a mistake on my last comment… that was 6 and not 7 accepted out of 10.

In a few days I will take my second attempt. Thanks for your advice! I hope I will get accepted this time.

I hope you'll do a guide on how to approach the submission test for istockphoto, or just some tips will be great! =)
The reason is that I find istockphoto to be much more difficult than shutterstock. But at the end of the day, I wonder if it is worth the effort after the things that I've read about istock.

Regards.

Hi Orson,
Thanks a lot for your reply and the links.
I keep getting rejected (4 times) for the submission of 3 photos although the photos do well on other sites. Are the things that I should take note of (composition, noise etc) the same as what I should pay attention to for shutterstock? I would appreciate it if you could let us know what you did and what you would recommend.

Thanks again.

Just my first try on shutterstock & my portfolio was not accepted. 4 of the pictures had comments, which were quite helpful, but the other 6 said „7 of 10 not apprtoved“. Does this mean these pictures had a chance of being accepted? I am confused.

@Orson,
Thanks a lot for the advice and tip.
I really appreciate it. I'll have a go again 90 days later…!
And I'll be looking forward to your post regarding your earnings report for August! :D

I find your site and articles useful, I am an illustrator and I am working on the 10 illustrations for first submission on Shuterstock. I would like to ask you about the article: avoiding 2 or more photos with same subject (10 tips for photographers – point 3).
Would you recommend the same for illustrations or this is more for photos ?
I have 7 different subjects of which 2 (Christmas and love) are represented by two sets of illustrations.
The two illustrations with same subject are very different in the design and style and I don’t use same character in the illustrations.
So, what is your opinion about using two illustrations for one subject.
I appreciate your answer.
Thomas.

Shutterstock has gone the same way as Alamy – once they get past „X“ million imgages they do not want any more but don't have the integrity to tell new (or old) contributors that in case they might miss something. They are quite willing to put contributors to endless time and trouble, knowing full well that they will reject all images, however good they may be. Unless you have something VERY different I would advise anyone to completely forget about Shutterstock – you are just wasting your time. There really are plenty of other good sites out there.

If you doubt that just read the forum on their site – you will find many contributors of some years stating the same – even they can't get their images accepted now and some are seeing in excess of 50% rejects – that's loyalty for you. Not a nice outfit at all IMO

Shutterstock is the bottom of the barrel. It’s the most arrogant stock site out there, which would be expected if it wasn’t also the worst stock site out there. I conducted an experiment after reading some negative comments about SS to see if it was worth my time to sign up: I uploaded 10 images. 4 were rejected for very vague reasons (they claim to make these reasons clear so that newcomers can learn from their mistakes, but no such luck.) The most arrogant thing about the site is that they make submitters wait an entire month before they can submit another 10 photos. This makes absolutely no sense and totally justifies all the negative things I’ve read about the site. So a month later, I submitted the exact same 10 photos. This time, 5 were rejected and 3 of the accepted ones had been rejected the first time!!! This proves that they have no set standards and whether you get accepted or not depends entirely on which reviewer you get and his/her mood on that day. Also, I have thousands of photos that I gave file names to for submission to other sites, and when I finally got accepted at ShutterStock and attempted my first batch upload, it failed due to a “critical upload error”. I looked for the problem in the forum and discovered that there can’t be any spaces in the filename or the transfer will fail. So I would have to rename thousands of files to upload them. All this trouble and you only make $0.25-$0.33 per photo. I posted my own comment about how ridiculous this was and my comment was deleted within ten minutes. I guess they can't handle the truth. This level of arrogance is unheard of and I can’t believe there is even one positive review of ShutterStock anywhere. Trust me, folks, don’t waste your time.

Really shuttertsock is one of the easy ones today, fotolia strangely is harder.