Author Topic: Anyone know why over 12 million images vanished from SS on Feb 27 2020? (Read 2739 times)

Jo Ann Snover · « **on:** June 06, 2020, 23:45 »

I was wandering through the Wayback Machine to get some front-page counts of Shutterstock's images and "added weekly" numbers from earlier this year.

I was very surprised when I saw a big drop - 12,701,237 - on the afternoon of Feb 27 2020

That morning, the site said

Over 324,469,880 royalty-free images with 1,337,489 new stock images added weekly.

around 4pm it dropped to

Over 311,768,643 royalty-free images with 1,540,041 new stock images added weekly.

It then continued a steady climb up until recently

I wondered if there was some sort of contract that ended and they couldn't renew? It's such a big number.

This was not a one-day fluke; the numbers for the prior month had been climbing up from 319,604,978 on February 1 to 322,242,058 on Feb 15th and so on.

And as far as #BoycottShutterstock, one way to look at where we are today, is that we've wound the clock back to May 9th (so far). Or to Feb 23rd (when it was about the same number)

pics2 · « **Reply #1 on:** June 07, 2020, 00:06 »

That's interesting. The big players leave in silence. When Andrea Rodriguez left few years ago they had to delete around 200k images.

nd3000 · « **Reply #2 on:** June 07, 2020, 00:44 »

People had been reporting losing images then which I assume might be related to SS deleting similars and duplicates. Thats my guess.

Mimi the Cat · « **Reply #3 on:** June 07, 2020, 03:25 »

Perhaps I thought it was due to deleting all the stolen images...

then I remembered shitterstock couldn't be bothered putting in that kind of effort afterall a buck is a buck

pics2 · « **Reply #4 on:** June 07, 2020, 03:35 »

Quote from: nd3000 on June 07, 2020, 00:44

People had been reporting losing images then which I assume might be related to SS deleting similars and duplicates. Thats my guess.

What was that about, I didn't even know. They did delete some of my pictures containing word polaroid few years back.

Firn · « **Reply #5 on:** June 07, 2020, 03:48 »

There have been reports of contributors having their hole ports deleted due to too many similar images in the SS forum in the past months, so Shutterstock seems to be cleaning up their database a lot.
I remember one case where the contributor had milions of images in his port. Someone did the math and apparently he had been adding 600 images daily (!) for years, mostly grunge textures. With 600 computer generated textures daily for years, it's not surprising that they ended up looking all the same at some point.

Desintegrator · « **Reply #6 on:** June 07, 2020, 05:02 »

Could be some legal thing when they delete images of certain topic.
I remember one day when i lost 25 images from my port, and there was no information, could not figure out which ones

Another time i've got an email with 5-6 image IDs saying that those are deleted for some legal reasons.

Back many years ago there was that time when they deleted lots os car photos. Some time later lots of graffiti photos.

Could be somethinhg like that.

Or culling of some image thief of spam accounts