Daryn Cox

Awhile back I got really excited about submitting my royalty-free vector illustrations to Shutterstock.com. It’s been awhile since I’ve done anything but I’m finally getting around to submitting some more but since it’s been awhile I’ve forgotten the technical requirements. Looking up the specifics on their site was a bit of a dig so I’m going to post them here for next time and hopefully this will help someone out.

Once your artwork is complete follow these steps. Shutterstock requires both an EPS file and a JPEG preview file.

Step 1

It’s a good idea to not have any art work hanging off the artboard, if you have some that extends, draw a box that matches your artboard, select the box AND the piece that’s extending past it (grouping the piece is a good idea) and then right clicking and selecting MAKE CLIPPING MASK. Do this for any groups of images that extend past the art board.

Step 2

To clean things up, you should get rid of any color swatches you’re not using. Click the drop menu in the Swatches palette and then click “Select All Unused” then click the trash can to get rid of them.

Step 3

Now you want to make sure all your fonts are outlined. This is a simple one. Press CMD + A to select All, then “Create Outlines”.

Step 4

Now you need to save your file as an Illustrator 8 or 10 EPS file to ensure backward compatibility with older versions of Illustrator. File > Save AS  Name it and press “Save” to get the following diaglogue box. Just to be safe I always save as Illustrator 8 and leave the defaulted check boxes as they are.

Step 5

Now you need to make a JPG preview. To do this, I usually open the EPS file up in Photoshop. Hit Image > Image size and then change longest dimension to 500 the other dimension if constrained should follow suit. They like you to keep the preview image close to 500 x 400 pixels. The names for both files should be identical except for the extension. Ex: hardware_black.eps and hardware_black.jpg.

Step 6

Now you’re ready to upload your images. You can use Shutterstocks browser plugin, I prefer to use their FTP. I use the free FTP client called Filezilla (Google it).

Fire up Filezilla and put ftp.shutterstock.com in the ftp host: field.

Login with your email address and password associated with your Shutterstock contributor account and upload your files.

When you’re done, go to  submitted photos to keyword, categorize, upload any necessary releases, and submit the photos for final approval by our staff.

That’s it!