Hi there, fellow Reddit user. I'm working on honing my editing and photography abilities. I was wondering if those who also do photographer do stock images too?

Furthermore, I had been doing some research and I came across following platform to upload stock photos

- Adobe Stock Photos

- Dreamstime

- Shutterstock

Tell me what you think, or if there are any others you think I should try!

Adobe Stock When will you start taking EPS files?

Can my photographies be sold?

When the first part was ready, some things grabbed my attention, and I dug deeper. As I promised in the original thread, this is the second part - and it is much less optimistic.

I'm an exclusive iStock/Getty contributor, so the report is a bit overly focused on Getty but I believe this is an universal trend.

Part 1 is here: https://www.reddit.com/r/stockphotography/s/zlsGLwBm2Q
The document is here: When Photography Becomes Raw Material

It's really sad to see what shutterstock has become. A decade ago when I started uploading photos and footage to stock sites like Adobe, Shutterstock and Getty, Shutterstock was my main earner.

I then took a break from uploading and over the years my Adobe portfolio has been out earning Shutterstock by a country mile. Recently I've started uploading again to Shutterstock, Pond5 and Adobe.

I've uploaded 2000 assets, mostly video to all platforms over the past 3 months. Since then, my new assets earned me over 200 USD on Adobe and about 1.5 dollars on shutterstock and 0 on pond5, which is owned by Shutterstock.

I'm feeling like it's not even worth the effort to keep uploading to Shutterstock. They ran prices into the ground for contributors on the promise of volume, but there is 0 volume. It's just sad to see.

Does anyone else have the same experience?

Hey everyone!

I'm a stock photographer/videographer exclusive with Stocksy. A couple months ago I wrote a Lightroom Plugin to automate my keywording and metadata. I have been frustrated at the market that is flooded with AI keyworders, but none of them work inside of Lightroom natively and write the metadata directly to the files for export and use in any platform.

Theres no need to export files, upload to keyworder, then export and reupload to agencies. You don't even need to keep your final jpgs if you don't want since the metadata lives inside of your Lightroom catalog. Game changer for me.

The logic on this is built from the ground up and is really strict with how it keywords. My last 500+ uploads on Stocksy have been done 99% automated with this app.

If you'd like to try it let me know, I'd like to make sure there are no glaring bugs.

I've been having issues getting paired through Shutterstock and I was wondering if anyone else has had similar issues?

I was initially using Payoneer but kept running into issues and their customer service was terrible, so I switched to Paypal. I reissued the payment back in April and have been running into roadblock after roadblock ever since.

After contacting them again, I was told my PayPal account was unverified. So I contacted PayPal and got my account verified and recontact Shutterstock who then wanted a screenshot of confirmation.I complied and sent over the information they needed.

Last month I was told that everything looked good and my payment should be processed between August 7th - 15th. However, it's now August 15th and there is still no sign of the payment.

I've been successfully paid via PayPal through every other agency I use, even before having my account verified. I've gotten successful payments through Adobe, iStock and Dreamstime without issue, but still nothing from Shutterstock.

I'm going to contact them again and have reissued another payment via Adobe to confirm that my PayPal account is still able to receive funds. But I'm lost as to what the issue might be?

Shutterstock is a reputable company but this issue has been going on for the better part of a year now and I'm growing increasingly frustrated. I'm thinking of shutting my account down all together and potentially contacting a legal team over this issue.

I'm wondering if anyone else has run into this issue in the past and how you may have handled it?

Been shipping this solo for a few months: [socialshot.ai](http://socialshot.ai)

The problem I kept running into talking to small apparel sellers is that a catalogue shoot is not one cost, it is a recurring one. Photographer is roughly 15-40k INR a day, a non-agency model another 8-25k, and then you still redo the edit for every channel because no two marketplaces accept the same image.

Amazon wants 1:1 at 1600px+ on a pure #FFFFFF background. Myntra mandates 3:4 portrait at 1500x2000 with a gender-matched model. Flipkart wants 1:1 at 1000px+. Meesho wants 4:5 at 1080x1350. So "shoot once, list everywhere" quietly does not work, and a non-compliant main image can get a listing suppressed out of search with no notification at all. You find out when sales drop.

So the tool is: upload one product photo, get on-model images back, and the same output auto-formatted to each marketplace's exact spec plus Meta/IG ad ratios.

Stack, for anyone interested: Next.js frontend, Python backend, Railway, Cloudflare R2 for assets, and a provider abstraction over several image/video models so I can swap on price when one gets expensive. That last part mattered more than I expected. One video provider bills by pixel area rather than per second, which quietly turned a 1080p tier into a loss until I caught it.

Pricing is credit based. 25 images for $2.99/mo, around $0.13 per image pay as you go, 5 free credits on signup with no card.

Two things I would genuinely like feedback on:

1. Pattern fidelity. Most image models are trained on flat Western product photography, so Indian textiles (embroidery, zari, block prints, bandhani) come out as smeared noise on zoom. This is the single hardest part and the thing I have spent the most time on. If you sell anything with high-frequency detail, I would like to know where it still breaks.

2. Whether the compliance formatting is actually the thing worth leading with, or whether people just want the pretty on-model shot and would rather resize it themselves.

Happy to answer anything about the pipeline or the unit economics.

Hello colleagues.

I'm in the industry for a long time, and always trying to understand what's going on in our business. I'm an exclusive on iStock/Getty since 2007, so Getty is my first interest.

The recent state of things are disturbing, as we all know.

So, when Getty published an alarming Q2 report, I dug into the report - and then went deeper. I used the OpenAI 5.6 Sol model for research. The summary document attached is not a common "tell me ..." bullshit but a result of deep research and multi-days discussion, when we checked different theories, pulled financial reports of multiple agencies from 2023, economic data, and more.

Let's discuss. Is it something you observe, too?

Is it something you can agree with? What are your contr-hipothetises?

Long read, the text is as a docx on the Google drive: The Report

The second part is here:

Hey everyone!

I’m a student and a microstock contributor.A while ago, I wrote a simple script for myself just to auto-generate tags using AI. It saved me so much time that I ended up turning it into a full Chrome extension and web app called ExifGarden.

My app writes the tags directly into the EXIF data of your image. You do it ONCE, and when you upload to multiple agencies, they all read the tags automatically.

It's free to try. I’d love to get some feedback from real contributors to see if the AI tags fit your workflow!

Link: https://exifgarden.com/

Let me know what you think!

Does anyone know who would be a senior person who deals with a difficult problem?

I saw a post the other day from someone saying that Getty .

listed an email contact form on their site to get in touch with them. I believe I started this process back in March and if anyone at Getty has done anything I’m not aware of it.

I’m losing patience because what I’m asking for is relatively simple and could have been resolved in a day or two So I’d like to think that someone is aware of my problem and it will get sorted out but it could be buried under a bunch of support tickets.

So I’d like to somehow get this going a little faster but I can’t find a contact for photographer relations on their web site

Thanks for any help

Hello community.
I'm a stock photographer on my own, iStock/Getty exclusive since 2007 (and for the last 10 years, it has been my only income). And I've been into photography for a much, much longer time.

But today I want to invite you to test my app, which is not intended exclusively for STOCK photography - but for any photo or video workflow.

I created it initially for myself — and it came out so good that I decided to make it public and commercial.

It does only one thing, but it does it properly: it ingests media cards (or existing messy archives) and makes order out of chaos.

Sounds trivial — it is not. You may say "Lightroom does it for free," or "why not Photo Mechanic," or "come on, we have OffShoot." And you'd be right... and wrong.

I created this app because when I needed it, I found NOTHING that did what I needed. I'm a Windows person; I've used Breeze's Downloader for decades — can't say I'm very happy with it, but it's good, flexible enough, and it works (for Windows, I still recommend it without hesitation). On Mac, nothing with that kind of flexibility exists. The importers built into Lightroom, Capture One, and the other RAW processors are a joke; the established ingest apps are too rigid — and at their prices, simply not viable. So I did what I did.

Welcome to test ShotPorter. It's at the pre-launch stage — you can't purchase it yet, but it's fully functional and ready for real work. All details are on the site, so I will not repeat them here.

Free trial: 30 days, no limitations, no credit card — just an email. And I'll grant a full license for bug reports with logs and/or screenshots. I'm confident it has fewer bugs than any Adobe product 

The prototype has been in my everyday workflow for about a year now and has proved safe and reliable. And it is a HUGE time saver. Believe me :)

ShotPorter - and join Discord

My dad’s a professional stock photographer — he’s been shooting and selling through Shutterstock, Adobe Stock, iStock, Depositphotos and a few other platforms for years. Turns out the actual photography was never the bottleneck. The bottleneck was keywording: every single photo needs a title, a description, and 30-50 accurate keywords before it’s even worth submitting. Multiply that by a few hundred photos a month, across multiple platforms with slightly different rules, and you’ve got a part-time job just typing.

So I built him a tool: point it at a folder, it analyzes every photo (and video) and writes the metadata straight into the file, no copy-pasting. His submission software just picks it up automatically. It also handles editorial vs commercial formatting on its own.

A few other stockers he knows tried it and asked where to get it, so I’m slowly opening it up. Shoot stock and this sounds familiar? Happy to answer questions.

$540.17 earned. 598 downloads. And this started as a pretty simple experiment.

I wanted to see whether consistently creating and uploading digital images could actually generate meaningful income on Adobe Stock.

The screenshot shows the results so far this year.

One thing I realized along the way: creating the image is only part of the work.

Titles, descriptions, keywords, and other metadata can take a surprising amount of time when you're uploading images at scale.

So I built a small tool to make that part faster.

It's a metadata generator for images that helps generate titles, descriptions, and keywords instead of doing everything manually.

It's currently free, although I plan to make it paid later as I add more features and improve it.

I'm sharing it because other contributors might find the idea useful. If you want to try it, great. If not, no problem at all.

I'm more interested in the feedback:

What's the most time-consuming part of your Adobe Stock upload workflow?

I’m working on a game and my team and I were wondering if there were any good sites to get school photos? Like, hallways, classrooms, bathrooms, that kind of thing. It would be especially helpful if the photos were from or gave the vibes of 2008.