Important Announcement on the Future of the Stock Images Community

Why are we quoting this sentence? Because recently we seem to have lost sight of this purpose. Ultimately, those wanting to use stock images are the customers and the community hasn't been the most customer friendly of late. We have a lot of posts in the community daily, but many are of the same thing day in and day out and few are actually targeted at what users are looking for. You can imagine how overwhelming it must look to those coming in. In all honesty it looks like the only images we have available are insects, plants/flowers and fungus and we've had feedback from a few people that it looks like a dumping ground for these excess images. So in order to present a more inviting shop front we have come to the conclusion we'll need to get strict and tidy things up.

Please bear in mind, we are not a typical community, we have a specific focus and there is the opportunity here not just to potentiality receive recognition and earnings as you would on sites like Shutterstock, but to also earn each time you contribute via your post (we even currently have the support of a big curator). In a way contributors need to approach this in a business way and think of the customer and their personal reputation. There are lots of other photography communities if you would rather not try to cater for the customer and we encourage you to use them.

Moving forward, we will be muting any contributions with low image quality. If the same contributor continues to post low quality then they as an author will be muted from the community entirely. If we have an over supply of certain images, they will likely not be curated and those contributors who are making an effort to fill the gaps in what we are missing will be prioritised. Continued low effort may at some point lead to muting.

With the arrival of the new Hive Stock Image search feature images will hopefully become easier to find by the Hive community. In order for images to show on there contributors will need to add #hashtags to the body of the post, so they will need to be aware of how they are tagging them with customer searches in mind. Wrong tags will bring up bad results, which isn't user friendly.

Our goal is to educate first, so don't worry, we won't immediately be muting you. We try to make sure the information you need is available to access. The legal requirements we all have to abide by are in the pinned important information post. @crosheille has written up a checklist to self assess whether your images are authorable and we have an image ideas channel in our discord. Do make use of these resources and ask questions in the discord if needed. That's what it’s there for. Please note that it is not a place for dropping your post links and doing so will get you a warning followed by a ban if this is repeated.

We will be leaving notes on posts where the images shared are just repeating what's already available and directing the author to this post. If after a few weeks no improvement is starting to become apparent in the community then we will look at muting more posts.

This opportunity is what you make of it. The potentiality of customers using your contributions lies in your hands. We are here to give you the tools you need and to help guide you but the amount of care, work and effort you put into this is up to you. We are looking to provide incentives and rewards for those whom are serious about their work here and want to see the Stock Image community grow and further develop.

^{Gif created by @doze for the Stock Images community use.}