iStockphoto: Please Switch from Photographer Exclusive to Image Exclusive

If iStock is really interested in improving the quality of its collection and bringing the work of the best and most experienced photographers into its top end collections it needs to drop the requirement that exclusive photographers not have images that are licensed as RF with any other agency.  All the company really needs is that the specific images they represent, and any similars, not be in any other collection. They don’t need to define “exclusive” this tightly.  It is interesting that even Getty Images only requires “image exclusive”, but iStock want to have more control over the lives of its photographers.

The requirement that photographers can not have RF images anywhere else makes it impossible for most photographers who have participated in the traditional RF market to reap any of the benefits that iStock photographers receive from being able to license their images at higher price points. This not only discourages many experienced photographers from getting into microstock, but also makes it impossible for many of iStock’s existing contributors to move up from being non-exclusive photographers to exclusive.

The company is not only holding many of its existing contributors back from maximizing their potential, but it is discouraging them from continuing to supply new images to iStock, particularly when we also factor in the lowered royalty rate for non-exclusives.



Another interesting things about this strategy is that iStock is giving many of its images away for much less than customers would be willing to pay if the images were available in one of iStock’s higher priced brands. Thus iStock is committed to losing money in order to hold onto this principle.  

If a photographer has images with one or more traditional RF distributors then he or she must remove all of them from those collections before being allowed to participate in one of  iStock’s exclusive collections. Often, for contract reasons with the other distributor that is difficult to do. If the photographer happens to be lucky enough to only have images with one of the brands owned by Getty Images then he or she is allowed to become an iStock exclusive photographer.



Photographers who pull images from a distributor have chosen to give up a revenue stream and bet that they will more than make up the lost revenue by being exclusive with iStock. That’s a very risky bet. All the more so because there is no guarantee that iStock will even accept any of the images for marketing that are removed from the other agency.

If, iStock were willing to review all the images being represented by the other agency and guarantee the photographer, in advance of withdrawing them that iStock would include them in its collection as soon as they were made available, then it might make some sense to pull images from an existing site. However, as far as we can tell iStock is not willing to review images in this manner.

Another ridiculous rule is that photographers cannot place rejected images with any other royalty-fee distributor. iStock has a reputation for very tight editing, particularly with those photographers who are represented non-exclusively and who don’t have a track record of many downloads. That’s fine, but when a whole take is rejected the contributor ought to have the right to submit those images somewhere else. Everyone engaged in the microstock business knows that many of the image rejected by iStock sell very well through other distributors and if iStock has nothing similar in its collection the photographer ought to have the right to try to earn some revenue from those images.



The position iStock seems to have taken in holding to the Photographer Exclusive rather than Image Exclusive model is that the only photographers who can possibly produce good microstock images must have started in the RF business after 2005. One of the big complaints that traditional RF have had with microstock is that the price were too low. Now iStock had launched a strategy that has the potential to raise microstock prices significantly for images marketed through certain brands. They are basically telling the experienced photographers, “Sorry, you can’t play.”