Why is there poor quality control for keywords attributed to an image in Adobe Stock?

Forum|Forum|22 days ago
April 17, 2026
4 replies
33 views

I just came across an image (535300163) that has multiple conflicting keywords – alberta, british columbia, manitoba, lake ontario. It’s a photo of a neighborhood of houses, presumably in one of these very different places. So which province is it? It makes no sense. My search was for a specific city in Ontario.

Is it the Submitting Photographer making bad choices with keywords? Is it a Reviewer doing a terrible job – whether human or (more likely) robot?

The problem of bad search results has been persistent with Adobe Stock. I guess my question is (again), why is there such bad quality control, Adobe?

Or perhaps my question should be… What has taken me so long to switch to a competitor for my stock needs? At this point, it’s clear you’re not going to fix your search results. But you are good at raising the subscription price!

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Peter GreccoAuthor

Known Participant

Also… the reason I bring up their prices... I paid Adobe over $2000 last year alone for their services while they literally make record profits. And their “services” come with all kinds of bugs and, as mentioned ad nauseam, poor search results, all of which waste my time when I’m trying to hit deadlines. So ya, I’m frustrated.

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Peter GreccoAuthor

Known Participant

What you’re saying is that it’s difficult to keep on top of quality due to volume and that makes sense to some degree. But what I’m also hearing is that Adobe isn’t concerned about trying to improve the quality. Saying “it comes with the territory” suggests that the customer just has to like it or leave it and it’s not Adobe’s problem. But other services have better search results and large libraries, so we know it’s possible. Adobe just doesn’t want to. They are putting their resources elsewhere – like AI development and making sure they bill customers on time.

Jill_C

Community Expert

There is no way for the Adobe Stock reviewers to know if the keywords submitted by the Contributor are accurate when it comes to locations. I suppose at some future point, GPS exif data can be used to verify location, however there are hundreds of millions of legacy images in the Adobe Stock database. I’m not sure you’ll have a better experience at another stock agency because they are dependent on the honesty and thoroughness of the contributor. It’s a case of “Buyer Beware” when licensing such images.

Jill C., Forum Volunteer

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Peter GreccoAuthor

Known Participant

Agreed. But this was just one example of poor search results after years and years of using the service. I would post other examples (not related to location), but I have already done so on the forums. At times, pages of search returns where more than half have absolutely no relation to what was searched. To which you might say “search for better terms”, but what I’m talking about are search returns for stuff that should be dead simple but are egregiously incorrect.

Nancy OShea

Community Expert

Poor Contributor keyword choices. The Contributor likely used an inferior Keyword Generator to save time.

Stock receives thousands of submissions per week. Not hundreds, thousands.

Reviewers are human. They do the best they can with the limited time available to examine each asset.

The team evaluates content based on several criteria, including:

Legal standards
Technical qualities
Title and keyword accuracy 
Commercial value
Aesthetic properties
Uniqueness

Given the volume that Stock handles, (over 800 million assets), I expect some mistakes to slip through. It comes with the territory.

Nancy O'Shea— Product User & Community Expert

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