-- If youre reading this, it's all but certain that you've at some point in your career made money using an Adobe product: Photoshop, After Effects, Premiere Pro, Dreamweaver, maybe even the F word . The odds are better than even that one or more Adobe products are at the core of your work, if not your entire career.
With the Adobe Stock Contributor Portal comes a twist: Adobe now provides a platform for you to upload your footage, photos, and vector illustrations for sale into the libraries available to every Creative Cloud subscriber around the world, inside the Creative Cloud applications they're using every day, including Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and more.
Adobe Creative Cloud is no longer just a place to make stuff, or a place to buy stuff from the existing content already available there. Even though the Adobe Stock Contributor Portal is only in beta for now, Creative Cloud is already well-positioned to become the premiere place to sell stuff too.
And no, you don't need to be a Creative Cloud subscriber. You just need to have the Adobe ID in hand that you've likely had for years. Otherwise, it's a couple of quick clicks to create one, no subscription required.
GOAL ONE: MAKE IT EASY TO UPLOAD
The first goal of the Adobe Stock Contributor Portal, says Adobe Senior Director of Product Management Zeke Koch, is to make it super easy to contribute.
One of our major priorities for contributors is to maximize the time spent doing what you do best - capturing and creating content - and minimize time spent during the submission process. That's why we've integrated Adobe Stock contributor submission directly within Creative Cloud applications: right from where you create, saving you time and reducing friction.
For the first phase of the beta program, you'll be able to upload directly from Lightroom CC and Bridge CC, with a goal to quickly integrate into more CC apps.
For that matter, you can also use FTP, or good ol drag and drop in a dead-simple UI.
For the first round, there are some narrow-ish limits to media formats.
Images (Photos or Illustrations):
JPEG format only.
Images must have standard aspect ratios and cannot be resized.
Minimum image resolution is 1,600 x 2,400 pixels (4 megapixels)
Maximum image resolution is 65 megapixels
Maximum file size is 30 MB
Vectors:
AI or EPS format. We recommend to save your file compatible with earlier versions of Adobe Illustrator, such as Illustrator CS6.
The vector file must be placed in a zip archive that includes a JPEG preview.
The JPEG preview resolution should at least be 5,000 x 3,000 (15 million pixels).
Videos:
Content should be recorded in 4K DCI, UHD TV, or Full HD, with a minimum resolution of 1280x720 in .MOV, MP4, MPG ,or AVI format.
Duration needs to be at least 5 seconds and not exceed 60 seconds.
File size must be less than 3900MB (3.9GB).
Please avoid vertical or square framing.
That's not to say that every bit of media submitted will be accepted of course. We suspect that this will be more true than not for contributors making their way Creative Cloud-ward via Creative COW, but there's a review process of 2-5 days, during which time your work will be evaluated for legal, technical and quality standards.
Note that legal standards include razor-sharp model and property (yes, buildings and locations) releases, plus other considerations laid out here, but yeah, the work has to be good enough to make the cut.
Again, this seems like a slam dunk for the typical COW member, but Adobe also offers some solid tips on what they're looking for from a good stock photo, vector, or video, very much worth exploring here
Not only that, Adobe offers extensive guidelines for the kinds of reasons that will get your work rejected out of hand, here
GOAL TWO: MAKE IT EASY TO FIND
One of our major new features is suggested keywording, says Zeke. We leverage innovative machine learning technology to automatically generate the first five keywords of each image you submit.
Once your upload is complete, your work is analyzed for similarities to previously uploaded images or footage. The portal suggests an order for the keywords based on the relevance it discerns within your media, but these are easily reordered and edited as you see fit.
Zeke notes that, because the usefulness of autogenerated keywords relies on lots of people editing their keywords to further teach the machine during the beta cycle, this process will work better over time.
A small known issue that experienced taggers will want to note: auto-keywording doesn't work if keywords have already been added to your files (say, in Bridge). You'll also certainly be wanting to add more than five keywords, but with these little provisos, this looks to be a nifty little tool.
GOAL THREE: MAKE IT EASY TO MAKE MONEY
Nice and easy: 33% royalty for photos and vector art, up to 35% for video. Once you've reached $50, you can request payout via PayPal and Skrill.
The biggest way that Adobe is making it easy to make money, though, is by making the Adobe Stock Contributor Portal accessible. Dave Cross only has a couple of images up as of this writing, but he'd never gotten around to uploading anything at all anywhere else before this. Very definitely a step in the right direction for him, with presumably more contributions to follow.
I've never really explored the idea of selling my photos on stock sites, as it seemed like a lot of effort, Dave says. The Adobe Stock Contributor portal sure makes it easy, especially with the automatic suggestions for keywording.
Now there's no excuse for not to start selling my images.
Robert Kneschke is a professional photographer who's been selling a lot of stock content, and is already a Core Contributor to Adobe Stock. It
