Shutterstock review failure

A warning- it will be pure rant today. An irritating thing happened to me last weekend and I want to write about it. It proved once mor etime. that stock photography, if nothing else, requires persistance.

I have not submitted anything for probably couple of months, busy with other things in life and photography. Since my living room undergo a remodel, and we were not going anywhere this weekend, I decided to pick some best images out of many shot in the time period and submit them. for 23 images, i was working most Saturday and finished off Sunday morning. I was surprised myself how much time it took, I probably lost my workflow. I needed to keyword, put titles and description, do few adjustments (mostly levels, clarity, vibrance, some detail, I wrote some about my stock workflow here). Then, upload, for which I recently use ProStockMaster, no more loging into each single site with ftp. Then categories, and finally done. As I said, took surprising lot of time. With the feeling of achievement, I had my Sunday lunch and went to few stores to pick stuff for the remodeling.
After coming back, I checked my e-mail, and here it was- e-mail from Shutterstock. All of the images got rejected. All of the images had this all-explaining note “Limited Commercial Value”. WTF?

As we all know, rejection is part of the microstock game and everybody needs to deal with it. But… it hardly happens, even to me, to get the whole batch rejected. After all, I am picking my best bets from my files. It would be my editing skills failure.

I was, and in fact still am, seriously upset. From where I stand, I feel like the reviewer simply did not do his job. I think he/she did not even look at those images, really. Three and a half hour, which is exactly how much time it took before “we received your submission” to “status of your recently uploaded images” was 3.5 h. Hardly enough to look at them, even if there were no other submissions in the queue. Which is hardly possible. So which was it? Bad day? Catching up with stats?

It probably was far less irritating, if it wasn’t for two things. One, this is my best selling site, and not having new images up deceases my sales week after week. And secondly, they were the least critical so far. And I do not remember reading anywhere that their standards had changed.

I guess for the moment there I was unsure about my images. But I am submitting to overall five agencies. Almost all of this batch was accepted into at least one of collections… So no, it was not the problem with images. Quite a few were accepted into iStock, which so far was the most demanding. So it was not it.

Well, nothing left to just go and submit something again. And hope that somebody on the other other end will do his job, fair and thorough this time.