My fundamental approach to microstock has been not to shoot for microstock’s sake, but to use microstock to compensate me for photos I was shooting anyway but may not have had a designated use for. There have been a few shoots I’ve done for purely mercenary purposes—photos of the Supreme Court and the U.S. Capitol, for example, that I might not have taken otherwise. But in general, this means that I have yet to ask any subject of any photo sign a model release that is required for any recognizable person for “royalty free” licensing most common on microstock sites.
Instead, I submit photos that contain recognizable people under “editorial” licenses, which are allegedly less marketable, but until I’m willing to stage smiling interactions between brightly lit businesspeople, I’m eschewing microstock’s most wanted images in favor of stuff I was interested in anyway. In DC, this has meant a lot of marches and rallies, which have sold at a steady trickle under editorial licenses.
However, each microstock site has its own idiosyncrasies when it comes to editorial photos, and you can save yourself a fair amount of frustration by mastering the various requirements of each site. At this point, I’m only aware of three major microstock sites that even accept editorial images: Dreamstime, Shutterstock, and BigStock. I have been submitting to all three for over a year. Here’s what I learned:
Shutterstock
Shutterstock requires a model release or editorial license for any “identifiable person.” In other words, if there’s a person in the shot, but they can’t be identified, it can be licensed as RF. There’s obviously some gray area there, but if it gets rejected, you can always resubmit as editorial. There’s also the requirement that any editorial shot be “newsworthy”—again, rather subjective, and apparently much of this can hinge on how you caption the photo. Here’s where Shutterstock is a little annoying, but I’ve gotten pretty good sales from them so it’s worth it. Click here to read their forum thread on editorial caption requirements. Here’s my summary:
- Follow the dateline format they require and then repeat the date in the caption itself. Yes, it eats up half of your 200 character limit on redundant information, but if you don’t, they’ll scold you and ask you to resubmit. Here’s their example: “JACKSON, NJ – JUNE 16: Singer Deborah Harry performs onstage at Six Flags Great Adventure June 16, 2008 in Jackson, NJ”
- Pictures don’t need to be recent to be newsworthy. If your image is not recent, reference a current or ongoing events, or throw in some fact or figure relating to the image that makes it relevant now and forever. For example, I’ve uploaded images from 2002 of Israeli soldiers in the Occupied West Bank.
- Shutterstock also requires name, age, and town/area of residence for any children. This is enforced unevenly, as some of my photos containing unidentified children have been approved, and the line between child/teen/adult is not completely clear. But I’m more likely to get ID info if there are kids involved. Here’s an example of when I did collect the info: “WASHINGTON, DC – MARCH 21: Daniel Rogel and son Daniel Rogel Jr. (4) of Silver Spring MD stand with some 200,000 immigrants’ rights activists on the National Mall on March 21, 2010 in Washington, DC.”
Despite some of Shutterstock’s inconvenient requirements, they review editorial submissions super-fast, often within 24 hours, sometimes faster. They also seem to allow more latitude on quality issues like sharpness, camera noise, etc. for especially newsworthy shots. I was kind of shocked that they accepted many of my U2 concert photos that were shot with my point-and-shoot Canon Powershot.
Dreamstime
Dreamstime has hazy requirements similar to Shutterstock regarding “recognizable” people, but here’s an example of a rejection message:
The main subject of the image (or part of it) is one or several persons, model release documentation is required even if the face is not visible.
Their captioning requirements are much less strict than Shutterstock’s, but they do require that you include “editorial info” such as event-related links or links from news sites. That usually means a quick Google News search to find a recent article relating to the content of the photo—either directly, as in the case of the many protest rallies I’ve shot—or indirectly, such as finding an article about current events in the West Bank to go with photos I took there years ago. I just paste the URL in there and it works just fine.
Dreamstime has no ID requirements in their captions, so no need to get name/residence info for their sake, but if I’ve collected it anyway to submit to Shutterstock, I’ll include it in my Dreamstime caption. Their length limits are also more relaxed.
Dreamstime also allows you to send a “priority review” request through their “contact us” page, so that editorial images get reviewed much faster than RF images. Paste in all the image IDs for your breaking news editorial shots into the contact form and they’ll get reviewed pretty quick. There are even $5 bonuses for “In the News” images that they feature.
BigStock
I’ve stopped submitting any photos to BigStock for the following reasons: Picky, picky, picky. Slow, slow, slow. Cold, cold, cold (as in sales). They have consistently rejected photos approved by Shutterstock and Dreamstime, and despite such high standards sell very few of my photos that they do accept. They also take a very long time to review images, and there’s no way to request expedited review for breaking news events. So I got tired of having my photos rejected for bogus “out of focus” or “composition” reasons when those same images were accepted and making decent sales on other sites. It just wasn’t worth my time. For a while their only redeeming feature was a great batch caption/category/keyword submitting tool that was superior to every other microstock site. And then they redesigned their site. And despite the aesthetic improvement, the upload process is no longer as awesome. Oh well. They were acquired by Shutterstock a few months back, but other than the site redesign, I haven’t observed any difference in sales or general viability.
Others
It’s also worth noting that a few other microstock sites that don’t accept editorial images have fairly forgiving requirements for what constitutes a “recognizable” person. Both Fotolia and iStockphoto seem to be OK with people appearing in RF images, as long as their faces aren’t visible. For example, both Fotolia accepted this photo of a kayaker in Trondheim, Norway, even though I didn’t swim out and get a model release from him.
Maybe if I just got more industrious and started getting model releases, this would all be moot. But somehow I don’t thing these guys would cooperate…
