Every file you send to Shutterstock carries four metadata fields, three of them required: a description written as a factual sentence, between seven and fifty keywords, and one category with a second one optional. Location is the fourth and you can leave it empty. Get these wrong and the file comes back under a metadata rejection rather than a quality one.
The numbers below come from Shutterstock's own contributor documentation rather than from community folklore, which matters because one of the most-quoted limits appears in two different places with two different values. What follows is a field-by-field reference: what each box expects, where the hard limits sit, which rules apply only to editorial work, and which mistakes trigger the specific rejection codes you see in the Recently reviewed tab.
The description field expects a sentence, not a word list
Shutterstock calls the title box a description, and its publishing standard defines it as a factual sentence that describes the subject matter of the file. The guidance the review team gives is to treat it like a news headline: answer who, what, when, where and why, and carry the mood of the shot while you do it. Descriptions should be unique to the file and detailed enough to identify it on their own.
The failure mode reviewers name explicitly is a description that is really a keyword list wearing a sentence's clothes. Shutterstock publishes its own before-and-after pair for this. Marked wrong: "Pattern. Background. Dogs. Flowers." Marked right: "Seamless pattern of a Shiba Inu dog with blue, red and pink floral background elements." The second one is longer, but length is not what makes it pass. It reads as one statement about one image.
Two character limits, and only one of them constrains you
This is where contributors get contradictory answers. The Content Publishing Standards page states that the maximum length of a description is 2,048 characters. The Portfolio help article that documents the actual submission editor states there is a 150 character limit in that field. Both are Shutterstock's own pages, and both are current.
Build your workflow around 150. That is the ceiling the box enforces when you paste text into it, and it is the one that will silently truncate a generated description if your tooling assumes otherwise. The 2,048 figure describes the outer boundary of what the system will store, not what the editor will accept. In practice nothing above roughly 120 characters helps a buyer scanning a results grid anyway, so the tighter limit is not a real constraint on quality.
Descriptions must be in English. The exceptions are narrow and worth knowing: scientific Latin names of plants and animals, names of places, and foreign terms or phrases already in common English use. Beyond that, no links, no camera settings, no repeated words or phrases, and no trademarks unless the file is going in as editorial.
Keywords: seven at the floor, fifty at the ceiling
A minimum of seven keywords is required and the maximum is fifty. Keywords can be single words or compound words, and a compound word counts as one keyword rather than two. The same English-only rule applies, with the same three exceptions.
Seven is a floor, not a target. What Shutterstock actually asks for is precision: terms tailored to that individual file, describing both what is literally in the frame and what the image might represent. Broader topics, feelings, concepts and associations are explicitly wanted, which is the part contributors under-serve when they stop at the literal inventory of objects.
What counts as keyword spamming
Shutterstock defines spamming as overusing repeated or irrelevant terms, and it publishes a bad example that commits both offences at once: Shiba Inu dog, flowers, cats, people, doctor, Husky, dog, dogs, dogging, dogged, doggy, dog standing, dog sitting, dog walking, smiling dog, golden dog. Half of that list is morphological variants of one word. The other half names subjects that are not in the frame.
The approved version of the same image reads: illustration, graphic, color, wallpaper, textile, background, creative, design, decorative, art, pattern, modern, yellow, dog, shiba inu, gold, flower, blue, natural, seamless, floral. Twenty-one keywords, no repeats, and a mix of literal subject, medium, colour and use case. That mix is the pattern worth copying, not the count.
Padding a set out to fifty with weak terms is the most common self-inflicted wound in this field. Every irrelevant keyword is a chance for the file to surface against a search it cannot satisfy, and a buyer who scrolls past your thumbnail teaches the search engine something you did not want it to learn.
Categories: one required, one optional, seven closed to video
One category is required on every submission and a second is optional. Shutterstock publishes twenty-six of them, from Abstract and Animals/Wildlife through to Transportation and Vintage, each with a written definition of what belongs inside it.
Seven of those categories are marked as not available for video: Abstract, Beauty/Fashion, Celebrities, Interiors, Miscellaneous, Parks/Outdoor and Vintage. If you keyword photos and footage through the same template, this is the rule that quietly breaks it, because a category that validates on a JPEG will not validate on the clip shot beside it.
Miscellaneous exists as a genuine catch-all and its definition says so plainly: it can be used for any subject matter. That does not make it a good default. Category is one of the filters buyers narrow with before they ever look at a thumbnail, and a portrait filed under Miscellaneous instead of People has removed itself from that filter for the life of the file.
Location is optional, but verified the moment you fill it
The location field is optional across every asset type, photos, illustrations, vectors and video alike. It identifies the geographic place shown in the content, and Shutterstock asks you to be as specific as you can manage: region, town, or even neighbourhood.
The catch is in the second half of the rule. Optional does not mean unchecked. If you complete the field, reviewers verify it against the visible content, against the rest of your metadata, and against the property release if one is attached. A vague or wrong location is worse than an empty one, because an empty field cannot contradict anything.
What Shutterstock bans outright from titles and keywords
Several prohibitions sit on top of the field limits and apply to the description and the keyword set equally:
- Trademarks, brand names and product names on commercial content. Editorial content is the exception.
- Sensitive personally identifiable information, with social security numbers and financial information named directly.
- Links and specific camera information. Your body and lens do not belong in the description.
- Emojis, spam, spelling errors and grammatical errors. Titles and keywords are expected to be clean.
- Case numbers issued by support. Those belong in Notes for Reviewer, not in the metadata.
- Terminology that is offensive, hateful, racist, derogatory, discriminatory or disrespectful, with a separate standard for content depicting race, ethnicity, disability, age, religion, gender or sexual orientation.
When metadata fails, it fails under its own rejection codes: Metadata - Commercial Requirements and Metadata - Editorial Requirements. Both fire when the words attached to a file do not relate to the subject the file actually depicts. That is a categorically different problem from a technical rejection, and worth separating in your head from the focus, noise and licensing rejections that come from the image itself. One means reshoot. The other means retype.
Editorial submissions carry two extra required elements
Documentary editorial content is held to a longer description standard. Alongside the factual sentence, the description must include the day, month and year the content was taken, and the geographical location where it was shot. Content captured before the year 2000 needs only the year or the decade.
Shutterstock's own editorial example shows the expected shape: London, UK, England - APRIL 27, 2019: Traditional fish and chips van at Southbank. Place first, date next, then the sentence. If the date or the location is missing or inaccurate, the file is rejected under Metadata - Editorial Requirements even when the image is technically flawless.
The trade-off runs the other way on trademarks. Brand names and product names that would sink a commercial submission are permitted on editorial, because the entire point of the licence is to document a real thing that exists in the world. This is the one place where the commercial and editorial metadata rules genuinely diverge rather than simply differing in strictness.
The clock running behind the fields
Metadata is not the only thing with limits. Uploaded files that have not been submitted sit in the Not submitted tab for twenty-one days, after which they are deleted from Shutterstock's servers and disappear from your portfolio. Uploading a shoot and coming back to keyword it next month is not a workflow the platform supports.
Inside the editor you can select up to a hundred files at once by clicking a thumbnail and choosing Select page, which is the practical ceiling on how much you can edit in one pass. After review, approved content is published to the marketplace catalogue within seventy-two hours, and results stay visible in the Recently reviewed tab for twenty-one days before they roll off.
That last window matters more than it sounds. Twenty-one days is your only chance to read the rejection reasons on a batch and learn from them. Miss it and you lose the feedback, not just the files.
Holding these fields steady across a whole batch
Individually none of these fields is hard. The difficulty is that they are not the same fields anyone else uses. Shutterstock wants seven to fifty keywords and a 150-character description; Adobe Stock allocates forty-nine keyword slots and a shorter title, and weights the first ten keywords differently. A metadata set built for one is not automatically valid on the other, and the mismatch usually surfaces as a rejection rather than a warning.
At small volumes you absorb that by hand. At a few hundred files a week you need the rules encoded somewhere: a CSV built to Shutterstock's column layout so the fields land where the importer expects them, and an FTP route into the submission queue so the upload itself is not the bottleneck.
This is the gap Rastock.ai was built for. It writes titles, descriptions and keywords from the image itself, holds each agency's limits as rules rather than suggestions, and delivers the finished files over FTP to more than ten agencies from one pass. Banned and mandatory keyword lists are enforced per destination, so a term that is legal on an editorial file does not leak onto a commercial one. There is no revenue share and no claim on your files, IPTC and CSV export stay open, and the 14-day trial runs without a card.
The field reference in one pass
- Description: required. A factual sentence, unique to the file. The submission editor enforces 150 characters; the published standard names 2,048 as the outer maximum. English only, with three narrow exceptions.
- Keywords: required. Minimum seven, maximum fifty. Single or compound words, English, relevant to the depicted subject.
- Category: one required, a second optional. Twenty-six available, seven of them closed to video.
- Location: optional, but verified by reviewers if completed. Be specific or leave it blank.
- Editorial only: the description must also carry the day, month and year of capture and the geographic location. Trademarks are permitted.
- Timing: twenty-one days to submit an upload, seventy-two hours from approval to publication, twenty-one days of visible review results.
None of this is difficult to satisfy on a single file. All of it is difficult to satisfy identically on the four hundredth file of the week, which is the real reason metadata rejections cluster at the end of a batch rather than the start.
Related reading
- Shutterstock rejection reasons and how to fix every one - what happens when the file, rather than the metadata, is the problem.
- The Shutterstock CSV template - the column layout that carries these fields in bulk.
- Adobe Stock metadata requirements - the same reference for the other large agency, where almost every number differs.
- How to write metadata for stock photos - the craft side, once the limits are settled.
Frequently asked questions
How many keywords does Shutterstock require?
At least seven and no more than fifty. Seven is a hard floor, not a recommendation, and a file with six will not submit. Fifty is the ceiling, and reaching it is not a goal in itself. Keywords may be single or compound words, must be in English, and must relate to what the file shows or plausibly represents. Padding a set with weak terms is treated as spamming.
What is the character limit for a Shutterstock description?
Two figures circulate because Shutterstock publishes two. The Content Publishing Standards page names 2,048 characters as the maximum length of a description. The Portfolio help article covering the submission editor states a 150 character limit in that field. Build your workflow around 150, since that is the ceiling the editor enforces when you paste text in.
Can I use the same categories for photos and video?
Not entirely. Shutterstock offers twenty-six categories, and seven are marked as unavailable for video: Abstract, Beauty/Fashion, Celebrities, Interiors, Miscellaneous, Parks/Outdoor and Vintage. A shared template across stills and footage will validate on the JPEG and fail on the clip. Photos and video need separate category logic even when the subject is identical.
Why was my content rejected for metadata rather than quality?
Shutterstock uses two dedicated codes, Metadata - Commercial Requirements and Metadata - Editorial Requirements, and both fire when the description or keywords do not relate to the subject depicted. The editorial code also fires when a documentary submission is missing an accurate date or geographic location. Nothing is wrong with the image in either case; the words attached to it are the problem.
Do I have to fill in the location field?
No. Location is optional for photos, illustrations, vectors and video. But if you complete it, reviewers verify it against the content, the rest of your metadata and the property release where one applies. An inaccurate location is worse than an empty field. On documentary editorial content the location is not optional at all, because the description itself must carry it.
How long do I have to add metadata after uploading?
Twenty-one days. Files sit in the Not submitted tab while you complete the required fields, and anything still unsubmitted after twenty-one days is deleted from Shutterstock's servers and removed from your portfolio. Uploading now and keywording later only works inside that window, which rules out treating the upload area as long-term storage.