I noticed a dramatic shift in our designer rankings this morning and went to look at the rating and new votes. I noticed that things are very tight between our top stock agencies:

Dreamstime: 7.02 from 47 voters
Shutterstock: 6.98 form 55 voters
iStockPhoto: 6.97 from 58 voters
StockXpert: 6.95 from 25 voters
Fotolia: 6.95 from 43 voters

How are all these agencies so close. I certainly use Dreamstime and Fotolia much more than StockXpert. What are the problems you are seeing (as photographer or designers with iStockPhoto? Why isn't is a 10/10 like so many people in the comments seem to say.

Are you find the improved StockXpert algorithm to be helpful in finding images?

Any thought are certainly welcome.


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iStock is getting like ShutterStock.

They seem to see things at 100% that take 200% for me to find something that resembles what they are stating as a reason for rejection. I notice that out of 15 images (all of which are selling well on four other sites) 1o were rejected for "Over Filtered from the Original". What Original? Six of them were scans and four were originals. The other three supposedly had "a few stray pixels". At 200%, I did manage to see a couple of stray pixels. This brings me to the suspission that they may actually be viewing at 200% or may just be grabing anything as an excuse to reject the image that has no people with a release. They are drasticly cutting down approvals. Also it is quite burdonsome to upload images to iStock - very sloooow. So I'l probably lay off gfor a few months and five them a try around the fall. They may be having great sales for the photogs that have been there for a couple of years, but I sure can't get sales when they jerck me around like that.

That may be why their rating is suffering. Same with ShutterStock - I have decided to upload to them no more than twice a year. They reject 100% with no explanation, and iStock rejects about 85% with the same reasons. It doesn't pay to resubmit to iStock either. I reduced the color saturation substantially and they still said it was over filtered? Right!

Have a good one!
Harry

Harry wrote:

iStock is getting like ShutterStock.

They seem to see things at 100% that take 200% for me to find something that resembles what they are stating as a reason for rejection. I notice that out of 15 images (all of which are selling well on four other sites) 1o were rejected for "Over Filtered from the Original". What Original? Six of them were scans and four were originals. The other three supposedly had "a few stray pixels". At 200%, I did manage to see a couple of stray pixels. This brings me to the suspission that they may actually be viewing at 200% or may just be grabing anything as an excuse to reject the image that has no people with a release. They are drasticly cutting down approvals. Also it is quite burdonsome to upload images to iStock - very sloooow. So I'l probably lay off gfor a few months and five them a try around the fall. They may be having great sales for the photogs that have been there for a couple of years, but I sure can't get sales when they jerck me around like that.

That may be why their rating is suffering. Same with ShutterStock - I have decided to upload to them no more than twice a year. They reject 100% with no explanation, and iStock rejects about 85% with the same reasons. It doesn't pay to resubmit to iStock either. I reduced the color saturation substantially and they still said it was over filtered? Right!

Have a good one!
Harry

I am exclusive at iStockphoto and by now I learned a little bit how inspection works. You start first by understanding what stated rejection reason really means. It gets much easier after that. Use their Critique Forum to learn more. I am not saying their way is right or wrong, just stating the way it is.

Hi there,

I am a member on istock since 2004 and I haven't posted much on the site but I'm an exclusive contributer, too, but still I sometimes have problems to understand why they are rejecting certain images and on the other hand they are accepting so much non stock images, it's ridiculous. My acceptance rate is ~60% which is actually quite good but it's a little dissapointing and frustrating when they don't accept your material. I can confirm what Harry said. They've rejected one of my images because of "aliasing" on 200%. What the ...

The upload queue is a joke by itself ...

Nice forum by the the way

Sven