Shutterstock is proud to be one of the biggest creative content platforms in the world, but we do not bind our contributing artists to our platform alone. In fact, we encourage our contributors to expand their creative reach by contributing to a variety of platforms and stock sites.

When you submit your content to Shutterstock, you allow us to license it on your behalf, but you always retain the copyright to your work. This means that regardless of the number of downloads you attain with your Shutterstock portfolio, you are free to display and sell that work on any other site.

If you plan to submit your content to multiple platforms, you can greatly reduce the time for submission prep work by embedding your metadata. Programs such as Adobe Bridge, Adobe Lightroom, or Photo Mechanic allow you to attach titles and keywords directly to your images. On Shutterstock we also support uploading metadata in a CSV format--this is particularly useful if you plan to upload large batches of files at the same time. You can learn more about it here.