Where Your AI Photos Are Welcome

The microstock landscape has split into two clear camps. On one side are platforms that openly encourage contributors to upload AI generated content: Adobe Stock has a dedicated review queue and detailed standards for “Generative AI” uploads, provided you label the file correctly and keep obvious artefacts out of the frame. Dreamstime and 123RF take a similar stance, spelling out rights, quality and disclosure rules while insisting the work sit in an AI-specific category.

• Adobe Stock – accepts contributor-made generative-AI images that follow its “Generative AI” technical, legal and quality standards.

• Dreamstime – allows AI-generated photos and illustrations when they are properly labelled and meet the site’s content rules.

• 123RF – openly welcomes AI artwork. All AI images should be uploaded under the AI category

• Freepik – permits AI-created assets so long as contributors tick the “AI-generated” checkbox and tag their files accordingly.

The other camp is still closed. Shutterstock markets its own in-house generator but continues to block outside AI images in the contributor FAQ. Getty Images/iStock directs artists to its generator instead of allowing third-party creations, and Alamy now positions itself as an outlet for “authentic photography,” explicitly rejecting AI files during quality control. Policies can evolve quickly, so its possible that these sites will also allow AI content in the future.

By creating a backlog of relevant images you can always upload to these sites later if or when they change their AI policy.

Creating AI Content that Meets the Quality Standards

You no longer need a paid web app to render high quality images. With some technical knowledge and a decent GPU you can create AI generated images for free. Stable Diffusion remains the most popular self-hosted image generation engine, and its success has sparked a wave of innovation in the open source AI-model field. One of the stand-outs is Flux a new open-weight model from Black Forest Labs that rivals premium image generation tools like Midjourney while remaining free for commercial use under the Apache licence. Running Flux (or any Stable Diffusion model) locally lets you work at full resolution and try many different prompts all without spending a cent beyond your GPU's electricity.

There are also simpler hosted version of the stable diffusion model that removes the need for technical knowledge. Tools like Stable Diffusion Online or Midjourney lets you generate images from a simple website interface.

Automate Keywording and Scale Faster

Of course, if you start using AI for your image-creating process you want to focus on crafting the best visuals and streamlining your workflow. However, the keywording stage can steal precious hours from your creative process. Luckily you can automate that task by using the StockPhotoKeywords.com analysis tool. The tool is trained to provide optimal keywords and keyword ordering to give your images the best chance of ranking high in the different platform algorithms. The metadata is written straight into your file, so when you upload your images the fields are already populated with the right keywords and title.