Depositphotos publishes its metadata rules across about six separate help pages, which is why most contributors only discover a limit after a file comes back. The working summary is that you get one description field capped at 250 characters, up to 50 keywords with 25 to 30 recommended, and every word of it has to be in English.
None of that is hidden, exactly. It is just scattered between the contributor FAQ, the requirements article, and a keywording guide on the company blog that contains numbers the FAQ never mentions. This page pulls all of it into one reference, with each figure traced back to the Depositphotos page that states it.
The file has to qualify before the metadata counts
Depositphotos' requirements article sets the technical floor. Photographs must be JPEG, at least 2400 x 1600 pixels, no more than 50 MB, and attributed in English. Files may not be modified from their original size, and artificially enlarging, stretching or distorting an image to clear the resolution bar is called out as its own violation.
There is one wrinkle worth knowing before you build a preflight check around it. The help page states the minimum as 3.4 MP and the company blog states it as 3.8 MP, while 2400 x 1600 multiplies out to 3.84 MP. The pixel dimensions are the only figure that stays the same across every Depositphotos page, so build your check on those and ignore the megapixel label.
Vectors follow a different path: EPS or AI, zipped together with a JPEG preview that clears the same 2400 x 1600 minimum, with the archive itself capped at 50 MB. PNG files have their own requirements article, which is a hint that PNG is handled as a special case rather than a general-purpose format here.
The description field: 250 characters, one sentence
Depositphotos treats description and keywords as two separate mandatory fields, and it wants genuinely different writing in each. The description is a literal account of the image: what is happening, where, and how it was shot. Its ceiling is 250 characters including spaces, and the guidance says it should contain at least four keywords' worth of substance.
Four specific pieces of advice come straight from Depositphotos' keywording guide, and each one has a reason behind it.
- Drop the articles. A, an and the consume characters out of a 250-character budget and contribute nothing to matching.
- Get number agreement right. Writing singular when the frame holds several objects is flagged as a mistake; the reverse is tolerated.
- Name the angle. Aerial, flatlay, vertical and horizontal all belong in the description, and buyers search on exactly those words.
- Describe this image, not a category. Depositphotos' own worked example contrasts "Young happy man working on laptop while sitting on couch in light room" with the version it rejects, "Young man at home."
That contrast is the whole lesson in miniature. The weak version is not inaccurate. It is simply true of ten thousand other files, which makes it useless for separating yours from theirs.
The Depositphotos keyword limit and how to spend it
The hard ceiling is 50 keywords. The number Depositphotos actually recommends, in its keywording guide, is 25 to 30. It is unusual for an agency to publish a recommendation well below its own limit, and the stated reasoning is worth taking seriously: a tighter set helps a file rank higher for the specific terms that genuinely match it.
The mechanics matter as much as the count. Depositphotos says a keyword should ideally be a single word, and that phrases or collocations may be broken into separate elements by the system. So a phrase you submit as one unit is not guaranteed to survive as one unit, and you cannot rely on multi-word keywords holding their shape.
What Depositphotos wants inside that budget is concrete: everything visible in the frame, the angle people are shot from, their approximate age and other distinguishing characteristics, and a location. Location is explicitly allowed to be either a named place like London or a generic one like studio, which is useful when a shoot has no identifiable setting.
Duplicates are called out as a fault in their own right. On a batch built from a template that is easy to trip over, because near-duplicates crawl in through synonym expansion rather than through copy and paste. If you are assembling keyword sets programmatically, deduplicate on stems rather than on exact strings.
The English-only rule most contributors miss
One line in the requirements article does more damage than any other when it is overlooked: the file should be attributed in English. That covers the title, the description and the keyword set. It is not a style preference; it sits in the same list as the resolution and file size rules.
The contributors this catches are the ones doing everything else right. If you sell into several markets and keep local-language keyword sets for agencies that accept them, the habit follows you into the Depositphotos uploader. Translate before submission rather than after, because fixing metadata on files already sitting in the review queue means going back to the end of it.
Depositphotos FTP upload: what it carries and what it does not
FTP is supported, and the setup is about as simple as it gets. Depositphotos publishes ftp.depositphotos.com as the host, with your account login as the username and your account password as the password. No separate FTP credentials, no application step.
Here is the part that shapes your whole workflow. Depositphotos' documented process moves uploaded files into an Unfinished Files folder, where you add the description and keywords before sending them for review. Nothing in its contributor documentation describes reading embedded IPTC or XMP fields off the file and populating the form from them.
That absence is not proof the parser does not exist, and contributors do report embedded metadata appearing. But documentation is what you can plan against, and the documented path is: FTP moves pixels, the web form captures meaning. Plan for the form, and treat any automatic pickup as a bonus.
This is exactly why writing clean IPTC and XMP fields into the file still pays off even at an agency that may not read them. Embedded metadata is the copy of record that travels with your archive, survives a drive migration, and can be re-exported as CSV for any agency that does accept a sidecar.
One more practical detail: Depositphotos states there are no restrictions on how often or how much you upload. There is no daily cap to schedule around, which makes nightly batches a reasonable pattern here in a way it is not at every agency.
Why files still get declined with perfect metadata
Depositphotos lists four reasons its inspectors decline an image: it fails the quality criteria, it contains unacceptable or forbidden elements, it fully or partly duplicates something already in the archive, or it has low artistic value. Metadata is not on that list, which tells you something about where metadata sits in the process.
Metadata is not what gets you accepted. It is what gets you found once you are. Those are different problems with different failure modes, and contributors who conflate them end up polishing keywords on files that were never going to clear review.
The duplicate clause deserves extra attention because it is the one that can catch a well-run pipeline. It covers files that coincide fully or in part with something already in the archive, which includes your own near-identical frames from the same burst. Submitting eight almost-identical shots of one setup is a good way to have seven of them read as duplicates.
The pattern generalises. Most agencies publish a short causes list and then send refusal emails that bundle several of them together, which is why reading rejection notices against the published list turns a vague message into a specific fix.
Releases are part of the submission, not an afterthought
If a file contains people, Depositphotos requires a model release for each person depicted, uploaded into the same Unfinished Files folder alongside the image. It provides separate forms for adult and minor models, and a property release for private property, though you may use your own forms instead.
Self-portraits are not exempt. Depositphotos states that even when the recognisable person is you, a personally signed release is still required. It is an easy assumption to get wrong, and it costs a resubmission cycle.
Because the release attaches at the same stage as the metadata, the two should be tracked as one unit per file rather than as separate chores. Keeping releases attached to files across agencies is the difference between a batch that clears review and one that stalls on paperwork.
The AI rule: a flat no, not a labelling requirement
Depositphotos does not accept AI-generated files from contributors at all. Its stated reason is protecting customers from copyright exposure. There is no AI-generated category to tick and no disclosure path that makes generated work eligible.
This is a genuine fork in the road for anyone distributing to several agencies at once. A generated file that is compliant and correctly labelled elsewhere is simply ineligible here, so the separation has to happen upstream, in how your library is organised, not downstream in a per-agency metadata tweak.
Worth noting that this applies to the contributor side only. Depositphotos runs its own AI generator and AI assistant for customers. The restriction is on what contributors may submit for sale, not on AI in the product.
A checklist that fits the way the fields actually work
Pulling the rules into the order you would actually apply them to a batch:
- Filter the batch on the hard technical rules first: JPEG, RGB, at least 2400 x 1600 pixels, under 50 MB, no upscaled files.
- Cull near-duplicates from the same burst before submission rather than letting the inspectors do it for you.
- Write the description as one specific sentence under 250 characters, articles stripped, angle named, singular and plural correct.
- Build a keyword set of 25 to 30 single words, deduplicated on stems, covering subject, angle, age, characteristics and location.
- Confirm every field is in English, including keywords carried over from another agency's set.
- Attach model or property releases to the same files in the Unfinished Files folder before sending anything for review.
None of those steps is difficult on ten files. All of them become a scheduling problem on a thousand, which is where a repeatable metadata process stops being optional.
Running Depositphotos alongside everything else
The awkwardness of Depositphotos is not any single rule. It is that its rules are close enough to every other agency's to feel interchangeable, and different enough in the details to break a shared template. A 250-character description ceiling, a recommended keyword count well below the limit, a hard English requirement and a flat AI prohibition are four places where a one-size-fits-all set quietly degrades.
The fix is to hold one canonical description of each image and derive each agency's submission from it, rather than writing once and hoping it fits everywhere. Mapping your fields to each agency's requirements is the part that scales; retyping is the part that does not.
This is the problem Rastock.ai was built around: generate the metadata once, enforce per-agency constraints such as keyword ceilings and banned terms before anything is sent, and deliver to 10+ agencies over FTP with status you can actually watch. The policy-aware side of the workflow matters more than raw speed here, because Depositphotos will not tell you a keyword set was truncated. It will simply use what fits.
If you are still deciding whether Depositphotos belongs in your distribution list at all, the wider contributor picture covers how royalties, contributor levels and review actually work there. This page is the field reference you come back to once you have decided.
Rastock offers a 14-day free trial with no card required, which is long enough to run a real Depositphotos batch through it and see whether the constraint checks catch things your current process misses.
Frequently asked questions
How many keywords does Depositphotos allow?
The keyword field accepts a maximum of 50 keywords, but Depositphotos' own keywording guide recommends stopping at 25 to 30. Its stated reason is that a tighter set helps a file rank higher for the specific terms that actually match it, rather than spreading relevance thinly across padding. Duplicates are explicitly discouraged, and multi-word phrases may be split into separate elements by the system.
What is the character limit on a Depositphotos description?
250 characters including spaces, and Depositphotos also states the field needs at least four keywords' worth of content. It has to read as a sentence or a phrase describing what is happening in the image, where, and how it was shot. Depositphotos advises dropping articles because they consume characters without adding search value, and getting singular and plural right for the objects in frame.
Does Depositphotos accept FTP uploads?
Yes. Depositphotos publishes ftp.depositphotos.com as the address, with your account login as the username and your account password as the password. FTP moves the files into your account, but Depositphotos' documented workflow still has them land in the Unfinished Files folder, where you add the description and keywords before sending them for review.
What resolution do Depositphotos images need?
2400 x 1600 pixels as a minimum, in JPEG with an RGB colour space, and no larger than 50 MB. Worth knowing: Depositphotos states that threshold as 3.4 MP on its help page and 3.8 MP on its blog, while 2400 x 1600 actually works out to 3.84 MP. The pixel dimensions are the figure that stays consistent across their pages, so treat those as the rule.
Can I write Depositphotos metadata in my own language?
No. The requirements page states plainly that the file should be attributed in English, which covers the title, the description and the keywords. This catches contributors who sell in several markets and keyword in a local language for other agencies. Translate before submission rather than after, because editing metadata on files already under review means waiting through the queue again.
Does Depositphotos accept AI-generated images from contributors?
No. Depositphotos' help centre states it does not accept AI-generated files for upload from contributors, and gives copyright exposure for its customers as the reason. This is a firm policy difference from agencies that accept AI work under a labelling requirement, so a portfolio that mixes generated and photographic work needs to be separated before it goes anywhere near the Depositphotos queue.