Most stock agencies want one language per file, and for several of them that language is English. Shutterstock requires English titles and keywords, with narrow exceptions for Latin species names, place names and foreign terms common in English. Adobe Stock instead asks that the language match your contributor account. Neither guide says much about accents, which makes text encoding the real risk.
What the agencies actually say about language
Shutterstock is the most explicit. Its contextual metadata standards state that descriptions and titles must be in English, and that keywords must be in English too. The same page carves out three exceptions: scientific Latin names of plants and animals, names of places, and foreign terms or phrases commonly used in the English language. Its guidance on rejected titles repeats the point, listing English as a requirement alongside a complete descriptive sentence of at least five words.
Adobe Stock takes a different line. Its titles and keywords guidance says they must match the language set in your Contributor Account, and that you should submit content in one language only. It frames accurate language selection as something that supports better search results and visibility. Nothing on that page says English is mandatory; the requirement is consistency with the account setting, so a contributor whose account is set to French is expected to write French titles and French keywords.
What happens to those keywords after upload is less clear. Contributors in Adobe's community forum report that keywords are shown in other languages while titles are not translated, and one expert suggests search terms may be translated at query time rather than stored in every language. That is community experience rather than official guidance, so treat it as a hint about behaviour, not a promise.
On accents specifically, the pages we checked are silent. Shutterstock tells you to exclude special characters from titles without listing which characters it means, and says titles and keywords should be free of spelling errors, grammatical errors, emojis and spam. Adobe's page does not list permitted characters at all. Because neither agency defines the boundary, an accented letter is a judgement call rather than a documented rule, and the sensible response is to test before you commit a whole batch.
Where accents actually break: embedded metadata
The more common failure has nothing to do with agency policy. It happens inside the file. IPTC-IIM, the older metadata block that many desktop tools still write, includes a tag called CodedCharacterSet that tells software how to decode the text in the rest of the record. ExifTool's documentation says the value of that tag affects the decoding of string values, and suggests setting it to UTF-8 whenever special characters are a possibility.
The same documentation warns that copying this tag between groups is unsafe, because existing tags in the destination image may use a different encoding. Put those two facts together and the classic symptom becomes easy to explain: text written as UTF-8 but read as a legacy encoding turns a simple accented letter into a pair of odd symbols. Nobody typed those symbols; the declaration and the bytes simply disagree.
XMP is the more forgiving neighbour, because it is stored as UTF-8 by design. If an accented keyword looks right in an XMP-aware tool but wrong in another, suspect the IPTC-IIM copy or a tool that rewrites it. Our guide to metadata that disappears after export covers the related problem of fields vanishing, and the article on keyword field limits explains why long keyword lists get cut.
When to use English and when to use your own language
The deciding factor is the strictest agency in your delivery set, not your preference. If Shutterstock is on the list, its English requirement applies to that submission regardless of what another platform accepts. The diagram below turns the guides above into a short decision path.
Which language should your keywords be in?
A decision path built from the agency guides: Shutterstock requires English titles and keywords with narrow exceptions, Adobe Stock requires the language of your contributor account, and mixed languages inside one set are discouraged.
- Write English as your master set when Shutterstock is in the delivery list, remembering its exceptions for Latin species names, place names and foreign terms common in English.
- Write in your account language when you deliver only to Adobe Stock, and keep every title and keyword in that single language.
- Keep two separate sets when your Adobe account language is not English but you also deliver to an English-only agency. Do not mix languages inside one set.
A routine that avoids the usual failures
- Decide the language for each agency before you generate metadata, not after, so you never have to untangle a mixed set.
- Upload a five-file test batch that includes accented words, then look at how the titles and keywords appear in the agency's own editor before sending the rest.
- Read the finished file back with a tool that shows both the XMP and IPTC copies, and treat XMP as the version you trust if they disagree.
- For English-only sets, one cautious approach is to use plain letters unless the word is a place name or a borrowed term in common English use, which are the cases Shutterstock names as exceptions.
Consistency matters as much as the language itself. A community expert on Adobe's forum argues that mixing languages in titles and keywords muddies how the dictionary interprets them, which fits the one-language rule in Adobe's own guide. For the wider rules on each platform, see our summaries of Shutterstock keywording rules and Adobe Stock keywording rules.
Where Rastock fits
Rastock generates metadata and delivers it to 10+ agencies over FTP and SFTP, with IPTC and CSV export that you can inspect before anything leaves your machine. It takes no revenue share and claims no ownership of your files. That inspection step is what matters here, because language and encoding problems are cheapest to catch in a small test batch. Our guide to mapping metadata fields to each agency's requirements shows how to plan that per-agency setup, and the features and pricing pages have the rest. There is a 14-day free trial and no card is required.
Frequently asked questions
Does Shutterstock accept non-English keywords?
Generally no. Shutterstock's contextual metadata standards say keywords must be in English, with exceptions for scientific Latin names of plants and animals, names of places, and foreign terms or phrases commonly used in the English language. Titles and descriptions follow the same rule, so a non-English set will need an English counterpart.
Does Adobe Stock require English keywords?
Adobe's titles and keywords guide says they must match the language set in your Contributor Account and that you should submit content in one language only. English is not named as mandatory on that page, but mixing languages within a submission is discouraged, so choose one and keep it consistent.
Are accented letters allowed in stock photo titles?
The pages we checked do not say. Shutterstock tells contributors to exclude special characters from titles without listing which ones, and Adobe's guide does not list permitted characters. Since the boundary is undocumented, test a small batch with accented words and check how the agency's editor displays them before uploading everything.
Why do accents turn into strange symbols after export?
Usually the declared encoding and the stored bytes disagree. IPTC-IIM has a CodedCharacterSet tag that controls how text is decoded, and ExifTool suggests setting it to UTF-8 when special characters are possible. If text is written as UTF-8 but read as a legacy encoding, accented letters appear as odd symbol pairs.
Should I translate my keywords for each agency?
If your delivery set includes agencies with different language rules, keep a separate set per language rather than mixing them in one file. Write each set natively or have it reviewed, because Adobe's guide asks for one language per submission and a literal translation can miss how buyers actually search.
Which non-English words are exceptions on Shutterstock?
Shutterstock names three: scientific Latin names of plants and animals, names of places, and foreign terms or phrases commonly used in the English language. A word outside those categories should be written in English, so a local-language keyword that is not a place name or a borrowed term is likely to be flagged.