Inconsistently applied standards – is there any appeal?

[Mllejules]

Other microstock sites I've contributed to have all had a process whereby you can appeal a rejection and actually communicate with someone. It doesn't seem to be possible here! Please tell me if it is. I want to talk to someone.

I uploaded a picture of a building that's in Vienna. It's old – it was built in the 1800s. There is nothing on their website restricting photography either interior or exterior. I checked before I uploaded it and Adobe already has several photos of this building in their portfolio. Less than a dozen, but enough. My photo is in a straight journalistic style. The photo is here: https://500px.com/photo/230829187/vienna-s-museums-by-julie-workman

And yet twice now they have rejected it for intellectual property violation. Truly nothing gets me as angry as feeling that other people on the same site are earning money from a subject that they won't even accept from me. It feels so unjust. And if it's really true that they shouldn't have photos of this building in their portfolio, then I want to tell someone so they can get rid of them. How is it that the reviewers don't check these things also?

By the way, I am confident that the photos that are up are not ones that have a property release.

[Abambo]

There are several points here:

• Adobe took over fotolia and streamlined the rules, so some pictures do not get accepted anymore that got accepted before.
• Keywords may also be the case for a refusal as may be the title. I know that the moderators are quite picky on keywords like « museum ».
• Me too, I’m missing an appeals procedure. The only procedure that exists is posting the image here and getting user comments and from time to time also comments from Adobe people. Adobe has the great advantage that they can look into your Portfolio and so detect also what is invisible to us users.

With your picture I would see not only ip problems (they may be handled) but also model release problems. I do not know at wich size the people are represented, but as soon as they could be identified, you will need a model release.

[jacquelingphoto2017 · Accepted solution]

Hi Mllejules

I looked at your image, and using the title with your image looked at the website, and yes there are a few there with some difference. There is only one that is very close to yours, but a bit different. Most of the buildings I saw was either cropped, or taken at an angle. The one that I saw that was very close to yours was taken at a little distance that could be describe as "across the road" (might not be that way, but how it appears), hence a little more landscape is added to the picture. Bearing in mind what Abambo says about the Fotolia images, which in fact is correct, and a process we do not know how long it will take, there is the matter of clear and direct focus on the building with limited landscape.

Property release and protection guidelines for Adobe Stock gives you some guidelines as to when you do not need a property release. Take a close look at the image illustrations there. They are there as visual guidelines for you to follow. Known image restrictions gives you information on what are known property that requires release, and that which will not be accepted at all.

On the matter of appeal

I believe this forum works very well for assisting persons to identify flaws. If there's a matter of us not identifying a reason for rejection, we refer the image to a staff member, who in turn does the necessary investigation/review/referral. It is extremely rare that an issue featured on this forum that does need reviewing the decision. Frankly from my experience, this system works better than the appeal. Here with the presence of an image you can see exactly where the issue is. That is not the case with some of the other sites.

Regards

JG