What’s more popular, spring or summer? Cats or dogs? In the past few months since we introduced the Keyword Trends Tool, we’ve had a lot of fun comparing words Shutterstock customers search for. We also identified some interesting seasonal trends that can help you figure out the best time to upload images to Shutterstock.

Here are 5 of our favorite charts, made with words suggested by members of the Shutterstock contributor team, and what we learned from each one.

1. Dogs beat cats.

You hear people talk about how popular cat pictures are on the Internet. But doggone it, Shutterstock customers are decidedly canine people, performing more searches for “dog” than “cat” week after week. Arf!

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What catches your eye when you look at this image? The warmth of the background? The bag in the center? Or the engagement between all three women? Probably the interactions of the photo subjects. That level of human connection makes this photo popular with our customers on Shutterstock Images — and its also a quality in demand on Shutterstock Footage.

Footage clips of customer-employee interaction are in high demand. To help inspire you to create footage like this, we’ve put together a list of some of our favorite tips for locations shooting. You may also find these tips helpful for shooting still images, or shooting people in other environments. Read More

By Shutterstock contributor Karl Rosencrants

Professional photographers have long used filters to assist in taking photographs. A neutral density gradient filter is an external filter that can darken the sky of a landscape as the image is being taken, allowing for a more balanced exposure of a landscape scene. The filter keeps the sky from becoming blown out and losing color and detail.

(Photo of a gradient filter ©mtsyri/Shutterstock)

With the advances in technology, Photoshop makes it possible to never have to rely on a neutral gradient filter again. Here’s how you can use Photoshop filters and gradients to improve the exposure and color balance in a photo.

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Videographers: You might be wondering what type of footage content is most requested by Shutterstock Footage customers. We’ve put together a list of a few categories that are in demand:

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As a Shutterstock contributor, you know how important accurate keywords are to growing your sales.

With our new Content Editor, we’ve given keywords more visual importance and made it easier for you to add and edit them. Here are some handy tips on how to perform common keyword tasks with the new content editor.

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Here’s some good news for illustrators. When you upload your illustrations to Shutterstock, you can now select any two categories to help customers locate your artwork. You no longer have to select “Illustrations/Clip-Art” or “Vectors” as one of your two choices.

Here are the details about what we changed:

• We removed the option to select “Illustration/Clip-Art” as a category in the Shutterstock Content Editor.
• All EPS uploads will appear in the “Illustrations/Clip-Art” and “Vectors” categories automatically.
• If you’re uploading JPG illustrations, select “Yes” for “Illus./Clip-Art” in the Content Editor and your files will appear in the “Illustrations/Clip-Art” category.
• You should choose 2 additional categories for each image that best relate to the content of your illustrations, to help customers find them.

We hope you enjoy this additional flexibility to file your images in categories!

Uploading your files to Shutterstock keeps getting easier! We just upgraded our Content Editor to make it faster and more powerful. For a limited time, you can continue to use the Batch Editor or the Legacy Editor but you should switch soon, as we will be phasing out those tools.

With the new content editor you can:

• Add titles, keywords and releases to several files at once, or just 1 at a time.
• Quickly add and delete keywords.
• Undo and redo changes.

We’ve also preserved all of the best features from the Batch and Legacy Editors:

• Copy and pasting keywords
• Tabbing through fields

Watch this short video to see how the new content editor will save you time:

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There are several ways to upload files to Shutterstock. You can use your web browser (either through our browser app or our HTML uploader, both available on submit.shutterstock.com). Or you can use a separate FTP program. We treat your files the same either way, so choose the method you prefer.

Generally, FTP is a time-saver when you have a big batch of files to transmit. Our advanced contributors prefer it, but some beginners find it intimidating. Here’s a primer on FTP for those who haven’t mastered it yet.

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Footage is hot, and many of our contributors are working hard on clips for Shutterstock Footage. Make sure you’re creating work that will get noticed in our collection and won’t get rejected. Based on recent trends we’re seeing in footage submissions, here’s a quick list of tips that will help you improve your acceptance rate and sales.
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By Shutterstock contributor Alexey Stiop

Quality standards in stock photography are climbing ever higher, so having photos that “pop” will help your work stand out and give your portfolio an edge. How can you create the most vivid images while preserving the maximum image quality?

Let’s suppose you’re already following the advice to shoot RAW or, at the very least, turning off in-camera processing of JPEG images. Vibrance and saturation sliders during RAW conversion will only get you so far before you seriously distort pixels and produce massive artifacts.

So you go out and shoot a nicely lit, colorful scene only to discover that once you’ve downloaded and converted the photo, it still looks bleak. What do you do? How do you breathe life back into this meant-to-be-oh-so-beautiful photograph and make it “pop”? Photoshop to the rescue!

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