Believe me, this is not a whinge about being rejected. I’m never offended by being rejected, it’s a part of life. If one of the best football managers in the world can be rejected for having a month of bad results, not one of the best photographers in the world can accept his photos being rejected. But to have them called snapshots is a little hard to stomach. It’s like offering Scolari a job at Accrington Stanley.

I generally wish that the agencies would offer a little more accurate information when sending rejection reasons. Instead of, your pic. was rejected because of this or possibly this. What? Does the reviewer not know the reason? I don’t mind getting set formatted responses, but there should be enough of them to fit every rejection reason. Surely there can only be a certain amount of rejection reasons. Here’s the snapshot in question which was rejected by BigStockPhoto, but has to date been downloaded 6 times elsewhere, from keen snapshot enthusiasts. Click to open.

© Photographer: Komar | Agency: Dreamstime.com

Despite this slightly belittling rejection reason, on the whole, I find BigStockPhoto to be one of the most respectful to photographers. Having been brought up in the U.K. where people tend to use the word ‘sorry’ excessively, I like the way they are always apologising to me. Tends to soften the blow of the rejection. Hang on, didn’t I say I was never offended by being rejected? Here’s a wonderful rejection which actually looks like the reviewer typed it himself. “Beautiful color! Simply too blurry, sorry!” I don’t want to show you the image, as it has been accepted elsewhere and don’t want those agencies to start inspecting the blurriness of the image.

Another observation of BigStockPhoto is that they seem to have an incredibly low tolerance of image adjustment in Photoshop. I keep getting, “Artifact Problems: Noise/Grain/Chromatic or other artifacts due to low light, blue or purple fringing, high ISO, over-sharpening or post processing techniques.” Even for images I shot in RAW. Not worried too much though as my acceptance ratio is still reasonable on BSP. It’s Dreamstime that frustrates me, recently I’ve not been able to get anything on, wonder if they’ve been reading my posts! Ironically this comes at a time when my downloads on DT have never been higher.

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Here’s a comment I left on a Dreamstime thread, where I’m actually complimentary to DT, yes I said COMPLIMENTARY to DT, so can you start accepting my pictures again please?

“From my experience here they are pretty fair, not too lenient in their acceptances, so that a certain standard is maintained and not too finicky, so that they are able keep a broad range of imagery and not just images from the super pros.

No review system can be perfect as mentioned before there is a human element. There can always be differences of opinion, you wear the clothes you wear because you like them, another person might have a completely different wardrobe.

However Dreamstime seem reasonably consistent and the rejection reasons they send are sufficient enough for me to understand and accept. 123rf give the least details, their set reply is usually just “Poor Lighting/Composition”. Well which one is it, poor lighting or composition? How am I expected to improve if they don’t tell me why an image is rejected?

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3 thoughts on “Hurry! Snap Up My Snapshots.

  1. Hi,

    I am a newbie and talk about a not too helpful rejection, look at this one from Fotolia.

    The image contains one or more technical problems:

    Blurry or out of focus
    Over/Under exposure
    Framing problem
    Over or under saturated colors
    Problems with contrast
    Noise or Pixelation
    Quality of routing
    Interpolation problem

    1. haha not exactly helpful is it? I don’t mind being rejected, well at least not too often anyway. It would however be nice if they were a bit more specific. I doubt the reviewer had time to look at your image and list several things that were wrong with it. More likely he found something that he didn’t like and and hit a few buttons.

  2. I love that dreamstime shot. Far from being a snapshot in my opinion. I agree with you totally about the politeness of bigstockphoto’s rejections (all those sorrys make this Hastings based photographer feel at home). Found your site through microstockgroup.com and have now subscribed for updates. Great stuff and a lot more entertaining than my own blog site! Regards, David

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