shutterstock download map

Back in November of last year, Shutterstock introduced a ‘Latest Downloads Map’ on the submitters homepage. Buyers anonymity is part and parcel of the microstock business, so although we don’t know who are buying our images we can now see on a world map, where our images are being bought from. Haha what fun, I always look at the map when I log in to see my images recent downloads and it never ceases to amaze me seeing my photos being downloaded from basically everywhere.

I couldn’t help noticing that I keep getting downloads from the ocean off the west coast of Africa. It’s been happening for months. I keep envisaging someone in a luxury yacht with internet connection, happily downloading images from Shutterstock. Yesterday, I had a download from the same location again. You can see it in the map above, the image of party goers clubbing in Bali, on the left of the map. So I decided to investigate and I typed ‘Africa map’ in Google and found a map of Africa and zoomed in. Alas, to my surprise I discovered some islands where I thought was just ocean, maybe they will name them after me 🙂 . But it seems I am a little late as they have already been named The Republic of Cape Verde.

It is possible to subscribe to the rss feed of submitters galleries on Shutterstock, so unless there happens to be lots of stock buyers from this tiny nation who just keep stumbling accross my portfolio, I assume that someone there has added my portfolio‘s rss feed and is following me. Nice! I could do with a few more of them.

Anyone been following you lately?

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6 thoughts on “I’m Being Followed

  1. I always assumed that those are just images for which the geomapping software didn’t have a location. Notice that they don’t have the little white circle that indicates location.

      1. It looks like it’s Lat 0 Long 0 – so I think Hank is right. Where else would you put images you don’t know where were downloaded?

        1. Take a look at this map. The location for Latitude 0 and Longitude 0 is in the centre of this map, which is much further South East from where I’m getting the downloads. I’m going back to the ‘I’m being followed theory’ and maybe this person is following Leslie too. 🙂

    1. Oy! Keep ur hands off my buyers Lol! This is getting interesting. Anyone else getting downloads from there? Maybe Hank is right, maybe images which the software can’t find the location for are dumped over The Republic of Cape Verde.

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