What is a preselect?

Contributors often wonder if they can submit content with unfinished post-processing, metadata or without attaching model and property releases. If you aren't sure we'll accept a series and don't want to take on all of the work on the submission checklist, the answer is yes! You can skip some of these steps and submit your series as a preselect.

Your submission checklist would then look like this:

✔️ Create great content

✔️ Select content to upload

Preselects aren't meant for contributors to empty their memory cards into the queue. Please do at least a first pass to remove similar content and check everything at 100% zoom so that you can remove files with technical or legal issues (i.e. soft focus, no possibility of getting a model release). 

❌ Post-processing

We don't check post-processing in a preselect, but if you're sending unedited assets, it helps to include a finished asset to give us a sense of your final vision. 

❌ Offline metadata

✔️ Export

The files must meet our minimum requirements for photos or videos.

✔️ Upload

✔️ Add to a shoot 

Put "PRESELECT" in the name of the shoot. You do not need to add this to the titles or descriptions of the assets. 

❌ Attach releases 

(But we'll assume you have them if needed.)

✔️ Basic on-site metadata

Our system requires a shoot date, title, description, location, and ten keywords. You can batch-select the entire series and add these to all assets.

✔️ Submit

An editor will be assigned to review your preselect. At this stage, we do not check the following: 

• Technical quality
• Post-processing
• Metadata
• Potential legal issues 

We only review the content itself, assuming everything else will be squared away when the series returns to the queue. If we make our selection and your content comes back to the queue with any of the above issues, it may still be sent back or declined. It's best to send a message to Support if you are looking for feedback or have concerns about anything listed above. 

What's Next?

After receiving our selection, finish everything in the submission checklist and, ideally, use the "Reupload" option in Image Manager to replace the files with the finished versions.

We know replacing assets one by one is time-consuming, and we hope to have a solution for this soon. In the meantime, please feel free to resubmit the final versions as new files. Add them to the same shoot as the selected assets. Once our editors publish the final versions, you can delete the sendbacks.