The 12-Point Microstock Upload Checklist

Every file we send to Adobe Stock, Vecteezy or Dreamstime passes these twelve checks first. Miss one and a reviewer rejects the file — or worse, it passes but never gets found. This is the exact list from our own production run, which has shipped 300+ raster assets across three agencies on a cheap server with no GPU.

Part 1 — The file itself

1. Format and size are right. JPG for raster, sRGB colour profile, longest side at least 2048 px. Underexposed, noisy or soft files get rejected on quality even when everything else is perfect. Export at the size the agency asks for; never upscale a small file to fake it.

2. The asset is genuinely unique. Agencies reject near-duplicates: the same composition with a new background, the same icon in five colours, minor re-exports. If a reviewer can see two of your files side by side and they look the same, one is a rejection. Build variety into the set on purpose.

3. No logos, brands, characters or celebrities. No company logos, no cartoon or movie characters, no recognisable faces without a release, no famous buildings. This is the most common rejection cause and the easiest to avoid: frame the shot to leave branding out, or cover it in post.

4. Releases are attached where needed. A recognisable person needs a signed model release; a minor needs a minor release; a recognisable building or product needs a property release. Attach them before you submit — you cannot add them after a rejection without resubmitting.

Part 2 — Metadata (where downloads are won or lost)

5. Title is 3 to 8 words, descriptive, first letter capital. Vecteezy enforces 3–8 words and only .,-' as punctuation. Describe what the image is, do not stuff keywords in. "Bright coffee culture flat vector pattern" beats "coffee, coffee cup, drink, cafe, beverage, morning".

6. Keywords: 5 minimum, 50 maximum, 20–30 is the sweet spot. English, lowercase, no special characters, one concept each. Mix the literal (what it is), the conceptual (what it means) and the use-case (where it fits). Vecteezy also expects an orientation keyword and, for people-free art, a no people keyword.

7. Your first five keywords carry the most weight. Ranking leans on the first five, so put the strongest, most-searched terms first. Do not waste slot one on a vague word like "design" when "seamless vector pattern" is what a buyer types.

8. Per-channel CSV matches that channel exactly. Header spelling and column order are case-sensitive. Vecteezy wants four columns Filename,Title,Description,Keywords; via SFTP the Filename has no extension. Build one metadata master and export one CSV per channel — never hand-edit after export.

9. Filenames survive the upload path. Agencies rewrite filenames differently on web versus FTP/SFTP: underscores kept or stripped, spaces become hyphens or underscores, case forced. The only shape safe everywhere is lowercase letters, digits and hyphens — e.g. bright-coffee-culture-592.jpg. Never use spaces or periods in production filenames.

Part 3 — AI-generated content (different rules)

10. AI-generated files are flagged as AI-generated. On Vecteezy the flag is a checkbox plus the program name, set inside the uploader's Add Data step — not something you pass through the CSV. Forgetting this is a policy violation, not a style nit.

11. AI photo content must be photo-realistic. Vecteezy accepts AI photo content only when it is photo-realistic; illustrated AI images submitted as photos are rejected. If your output is illustration, submit it through the illustration/vector path.

12. Run a quality gate before upload, not after. Grade every asset on a short rubric — composition, artefacts, text legibility, keyword fit — and drop anything below your bar. In our first run only 2 in 10 assets passed; fixing the prompt order and adding a QC step turned that around. A rejected file costs the slot and the review time.

The 60-second pre-flight

Before you hit submit, every file must answer yes to all twelve:

• JPG, sRGB, longest side ≥ 2048 px, sharp and clean
• Genuinely different from everything else in the batch
• No logos, brands, characters, celebrities
• Releases attached if any person or property is recognisable
• Title 3–8 words, descriptive, capitalised
• 20–30 English keywords, no special characters
• Strongest terms in the first five keyword slots
• CSV header and column order match the channel exactly
• Filename is lowercase letters, digits and hyphens only
• AI-generated flag set in Add Data (if applicable)
• AI photo content is photo-realistic (if applicable)
• Passed your own quality gate