Understanding Editorial At Shutterstock

An editorial photographer in London pointed out to me today that he has to notify Shutterstock when his pictures are used in order to get paid.

Evidently Shutterstock doesn’t know that it is standard practice of many publications in the UK not to notify the agency when they use an image. Instead, they wait for the agency or the photographer to call them or send them an invoice.

This works – to a certain degree – for UK photographers because they know that they have to keep watching the UK newspapers and magazines for their pictures and send the publication an invoice every time one of their pictures is used. To the rest of us in the world this is a very strange business practice, but it has been going on in the UK for a long time.



Editorial agencies in the UK know that they must keep watching for use of their images and send invoices. Alamy, for example, subscribes to all the UK publications and has a team of people going through them to find Alamy pictures.

This could be a particular problem with Shutterstock Enterprise customers who have access to unwatermarked previews. Only the publication knows which of the downloads are actually use and they may be waiting for Shutterstock to send them an invoice. If Shutterstock doesn’t have a team searching the publications of their Enterprise customers, they may not know what is being used.



According to the photographers I’ve talked to, this problem has happened more than once and Shutterstock’s response has been, “Let us know if you see one of your images.” Good luck to photographers who don’t happen to live in the UK and regularly read UK publications.

The editorial business is very different from the traditional microstock business and it is not clear that Shutterstock gets it.