Inspecting Photos

Royalty free stock photo sites have professional people called "image inspectors" who make sure that the uploaded photos are technically and legally sound.

I must say I respect these folks. Not only they must evaluate the technical execution of the photos, they must ensure that there's not going to be legal trouble if the photo is used in massive advertisement campaign. This means checking there's no logos, brand identities, license plates, barcodes or recognizable human faces (if photo is provided without a model release).

But that's not all. They must check the skies for dust specs, make sure there's no hot pixels, excess noise, and they must evaluate the overall lighting composition, and artistic value of the photo as well.

And there's crazy amount of photos, so these guys must also be efficient, which means they have to be quite fast with their work.

Often, there are "grey areas", a bit subjective things. For example a photo showing woman's hand. Woman is wearing unique looking bracelet, and there's no model release. Some inspectors accept the image and some reject it, fearing that the uniqueness of the bracelet will make model recognizable, thus requiring the model release.

Naval vessels are especially difficult area. If the ship is the main subject of the photo, it will most likely get rejected by stock agencies due to property related problems. If the ship's on background, this also becomes gray-area real fast. Depending how the inspector views the photo, it might get either rejected or accepted.

Different sites have different policies, some require more technical precision than others. For photographer, this often means self-discipline, as rejections can't be avoided. Even most popular photographers get rejections sometimes. Just keep going and chances are that more and more of your photos get accepted.