The PixTagger Blog
Practical keywording and metadata guides for Getty Images, iStock, and Adobe Stock contributors.
Getty Images and Chapter 11: What It Means for Contributors
Getty Images used a grace period on bond interest due 1 September 2026 and paid it on 30 September, avoiding a default; on 29 September the NYSE suspended its shares and began delisting them, while trade press reported a possible Chapter 11 filing and lenders discuss a bankruptcy loan. From the company’s own SEC filings: what is confirmed and what is only reported, why Chapter 11 is reorganisation rather than closure, why your copyright is not at risk, where the real exposure sits (royalties earned before a filing date), the two mechanisms that usually protect it, and five practical steps for Getty and iStock contributors.
Read guide →How to Keyword Stock Video: What Photo Rules Miss
A clip is not a photo with more frames. Keywords have to be true from the first frame to the last, camera movement is a keyword you cannot read off a still (a vision model named none of pan, tilt or zoom in our test), Getty's vocabulary calls a pan Panning and has no entry for a dolly shot, one model drifted across three age brackets in a 19-clip batch, and a rendered clip is dated the day you exported it.
Read guide →How to Write Stock Photo Titles and Descriptions
Every stock agency reads the title, and no two agree on its shape: Shutterstock rejects anything under a five-word sentence, Adobe wants a phrase under 70 characters, Pond5 caps it at 80, and editorial datelines come in three different orders. We put every agency's published rules side by side, show the 40–70 character line that passes all of them, and measured what the help pages cannot: before titles were checked, 26% of files in a batch shared their exact title with another file.
Read guide →Shoot Getty’s Briefs, or Your Own Ideas?
Getty and iStock exclusives argue about briefs as though it were vision against commerce. It is really a question of where production capacity goes, and the three lanes are paid by three different mechanisms. A Creative brief and your own concept are the same financial product — an ordinary library file on the same rate card — so a brief buys information, not income. Only Custom Content pays differently, and a selected file leaves the library permanently.
Read guide →One Photo, Two Agencies: The Keyword Lists Agree on 28%
If you sell the same photograph on Getty and on Adobe Stock, one keyword list looks like it should serve both. We measured 48 images that went through our pipeline twice, once aimed at each marketplace, and the finished lists share 28% of their keywords — while being almost exactly the same length. The cause is structural: Getty makes you pick from a fixed vocabulary of 24,631 terms, Adobe makes you match what a buyer types. Where they coincide you get Gym and Athlete; where they do not you get Body Building against Bodybuilding.
Read guide →Keywords Getty Refuses — Even From Its Own Vocabulary
Getty and iStock keyword against a controlled vocabulary, so the obvious rule is to use terms from it. That rule is not enough: contributors keep getting refused on terms that are squarely inside it. We compared the 24,632-term vocabulary against 33,027 published iStock images to find out why — proper nouns that read like descriptions, category words that describe no picture, and words that mean something else inside a stock vocabulary than they do in English.
Read guide →Stock Photography as a Business: Tax, Structure, Country
Three cuts stand between a licence and your bank account: the agency's share, US withholding tax, and your own country's tax and social contributions — and where you live decides the last two. How the W-8BEN sets a rate between 0% and 30%, why the question that really decides viability is "what do I pay in a month where I earn nothing?", when to incorporate and when not to, a four-stage path from solo contributor to a business with staff, and an honest region-by-region read on where stock photography is still realistic.
Read guide →AI-Generated Stock Images: The Prompt Is Your Metadata
Every image you generate ships with the best description of itself that will ever exist — the prompt you typed, written into the file. Most contributors never get it into their keywords, because three things silently destroy it first: a filename truncated at 64 characters, any resize or re-encode, and PNGs that keep the prompt somewhere JPEG tools never look. Where the prompt actually lives, how far you can trust it, which parts of it get accounts terminated, and which of the nine agencies accept AI work at all.
Read guide →Model & Property Releases: What 9 Agencies Require
Every agency agrees that a recognisable person or property needs a signed release, and then disagrees on almost every detail — whether a typed signature counts, whether a witness is required and who it may not be, who signs for a tattoo, and what happens when you attach a release nobody asked for. The signature rules, the minor rules, the property list, the editorial escape hatch and the upload mechanics, taken from each agency's own contributor documentation.
Read guide →Exclusive on iStock, or Non-Exclusive Everywhere?
The choice is usually argued as 15% against 25%, which hides the actual trade. iStock exclusivity is contributor-exclusive by file type — it covers photos you never submitted — while non-exclusive distribution costs you the same shoot keyworded four different ways. The rate ladders side by side, the metadata work quantified across four agencies, and what Getty's and Shutterstock's Q2 2026 results say about the storefronts on each side of the decision.
Read guide →Who Owns the Stock Agencies, and Can They Pay?
Contributors argue about royalty percentages as though they were a pricing choice. The filings suggest they are a symptom. Getty Images trades 97% below its 2022 debut, carries $2.06 billion of debt against a $114 million market value, and disclosed substantial doubt about continuing as a going concern. Shutterstock lost 11% of its subscribers and 12% of its paid downloads in a year and suspended its dividend. Adobe, meanwhile, earns $6.6 billion a quarter. The ownership map, the numbers, and what a contributor should actually do about them.
Read guide →The Getty ESP CSV, Field by Field
The metadata CSV is the least documented part of contributing to Getty and iStock. Every column explained, plus the details that decide whether an import works: why the created date has to be MM/DD/YYYY and has to come from EXIF rather than the file timestamp, which keywords Getty applies itself so you stop wasting slots on them, the byte-order mark that makes ESP find nothing, the trailing newline that eats your last row, and the DeepMeta import behaviour that means you must verify before uploading.
Read guide →Why Stock Photos and Video Get Rejected
A rejection notice gives you two words and no explanation. This is what each reason actually means, from the agencies' own moderation documentation: the published similar-content thresholds (Adobe's three variations, Shutterstock counting a different camera move as a similar, Getty's two-of-three rule), the metadata rules that fail files silently, the technical causes worth treating as a pre-flight checklist, the absolute legal refusals — and the resubmission limit that permanently kills a file on its second rejection.
Read guide →What One Stock Download Actually Pays
A 40% royalty at Shutterstock can pay ten cents. A 33% royalty at Adobe can pay ninety-nine. A 30% royalty at Pond5 applies to a price you set yourself. The real per-download economics across nine agencies — the floors and flat rates that override the percentage entirely, the level ladder that resets every January, Alamy's September 2026 restructure, and the payout thresholds that decide whether the money ever reaches you.
Read guide →Stock Video Specs & Metadata: 9 Agencies Compared
The same 60-second clip is legal at one agency, four seconds too long at another, and too big to upload at a third — and a keyword list that counts as thorough on Pond5 counts as stuffed on Adobe Stock. Every published video spec and metadata rule for nine agencies on one page: containers, codecs, frame rates, duration windows, file-size caps, keyword limits, title rules, filename rules and the exact CSV columns each importer expects.
Read guide →Are Getty Custom Content Briefs Worth It?
Getty pays $50-$100 per selected file at a 25% royalty — and its own numbers imply only 5-8% of submissions sell. The full trade: the licence clause that binds your files even if you leave Getty, the two-of-three similars rule that breaks the obvious double-shoot workaround, the three-month cycle before unsold work reaches your portfolio, and the opportunity cost nobody invoices.
Read guide →The Complete Shutterstock Contributor Guide (2026)
Everything Shutterstock actually requires, from their own contributor documentation: 4 MP and sRGB for stills, the full footage spec (.mov/.mp4, 5–60s, 10 GB, ProRes 422, vertical 4K), the title and keyword rules that cause most rejections, the bulk CSV route, the 15–40% royalty levels that reset every January, and why AI-generated submissions are not accepted.
Read guide →How AI Images Changed Stock Photographer Earnings
What the filings actually show: Getty and Shutterstock posted record 2025 revenue while the generatable half of the catalogue went flat then negative, Adobe Stock's library hit 47.9% AI-generated, and average earnings per file fell without a single royalty rate being cut. With charts, the independent research, and what to do about it.
Read guide →The Complete Adobe Stock Contributor Guide (2026)
How to contribute to Adobe Stock end to end: getting set up, file requirements (JPEG, sRGB, 4MP–100MP, up to 45MB), the 21 categories, releases, labelling AI content, the keywording Adobe's search actually rewards, CSV upload, and the rejection reasons that cost the most.
Read guide →The Complete Getty Images & iStock Contributor Guide (2026)
iStock is owned by Getty Images, so one application covers both. The full contributor workflow: how to apply, prepare files to spec, keyword for the controlled vocabulary, upload through the Contributor app and ESP, and avoid the rejection reasons that cost the most sales.
Read guide →Similar shots, same keywords: why your photos compete
Pasting one keyword set across a burst of near-identical frames risks duplicate-content rejection and makes the survivors cannibalise each other in search. Here's how to give each frame a different true leading keyword — with a real three-frame example — and how PixTagger's varied-context mode automates it.
Read guide →Stock agency metadata formats: CSV columns & keyword limits
A contributor's reference to how Getty, iStock, Adobe Stock, Shutterstock, Pond5, Dreamstime, Alamy, Depositphotos and 123RF accept titles, descriptions and keywords — which use a CSV, which read embedded IPTC/XMP, the exact columns, and the keyword limits.
Read guide →Best Stock Photo Sites to Sell On in 2026
Where should you sell stock photos? A contributor-first comparison of Adobe Stock, Shutterstock, iStock, Getty Images and 123RF — reach, royalties, exclusivity, and the keywording difference that decides whether your files sell.
Read guide →How many keywords should stock photos have?
How many keywords to use on Adobe Stock, Getty, iStock and Shutterstock — the limits per platform, why more isn't better, how many for video, and why Getty needs fewer than you think.
Read guide →Getty Images vs iStock: 2026 Royalty Rates
Official contributor royalty rates for Getty Images and iStock in 2026 — exclusive iStock starts at 25% on photos and video, 30% on illustrations — plus payment timing, exclusivity trade-offs, and which brand earns you more.
Read guide →Stock photo vs video: which should you shoot to sell?
Video pays more and faces less competition than stock photos — but it's harder to produce and far harder to keyword. Here's how photo and video really compare for contributors, and why metadata decides it.
Read guide →7 Adobe Stock metadata mistakes that quietly kill your sales
The title and keyword mistakes that keep Adobe Stock buyers from finding your work — and exactly how to fix each one, straight from Adobe's own contributor guidance.
Read guide →Adobe Stock keyword order: why the first keywords decide
On Adobe Stock, keyword order is a ranking signal — the leading keywords carry the most search weight. Here's the order that gets your photos and videos found and sold.
Read guide →How to keyword for Getty Images: controlled vocabulary
What Getty's controlled vocabulary is, why it decides whether your photos get found, and a practical keywording workflow that survives Getty and iStock review.
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