James R Sullivan

Working on a project with django and jupyter to provide analytics for stock photographers since my sister is a photographer that is trying to understand this market: http://marysullivan.co.uk

The shutterstock website has two sides, a contributor site (content producers) and customer site (buying content). The sites use different domains and the main api (found here: ) only has endpoints for the content library at the moment. If you are a contributor and want to analyze what people have purchased so you can figure out what to produce more of then you need contributor apis.

There is a master list of all resources but many of them don’t work: https://api.shutterstock.com/v2/api-docs/all

Some endpoints do exist for this data but they return a message that you aren’t allowed:

GET https://api.shutterstock.com/v2/contributor/images

{"message": "Contributor functionality not enabled for client_id \"de237f4ba771bc0c7c01\", please contact api@shutterstock.com"}

GET https://api.shutterstock.com/v2/contributor/earnings/summary

{"message": "Contributor functionality not enabled for client_id \"de237f4ba771bc0c7c01\", please contact api@shutterstock.com"}

Googling for that message or those endpoints returns zero results so I emailed the address and am waiting to hear back about which APIs should be used. The first response was that contributor API endpoints have been discontinued in favor of the content apis. I’ll update here as soon as I hear back officially.

Update: Sat April 22, 2017 The APIs are no longer available and they may offer them again in the future, but for now I have to screen scrape to get contributor data. I found stackoverflow articles from developers at shutterstock asking about how to do things in python and saying they are rewriting a site from years ago, so they probably killed the apis when they rebuilt the site and haven’t gotten around to making the APIs again yet.