RushPilot for Pond5 contributors

What Pond5 asks of each clip

Pond5 is looser than Shutterstock on resolution and stricter on file size. The table covers what a clip must pass before its metadata is even read.

Motion JPEG is the trap for contributors who also sell on Adobe Stock, which lists it. The other footage rules, from R3D zips to alpha channels, are on the Pond5 upload requirements page.

Pond5 titles and keywords

On Pond5 the title carries the most rules. It is required, must run 40 to 80 characters, and must be in English, except for names of places or objects more often searched in their own language. The description is optional.

Pond5 runs image recognition on your uploads and suggests keywords. Its tagging page asks you to review them and remove any that do not apply, and you can turn the feature off in your preferences. Filling titles or keywords with popular terms that do not match the clip leads to rejection.

Editorial clips follow a fixed caption, in the title or the description: CITY, COUNTRY (STATE) - YEAR/MONTH/DAY: Factual description, then a curator note asking for the clip to be marked Editorial Use Only. How to write the title itself is covered in titles and descriptions for stock footage.

Where Pond5 uploads stall

File names

Pond5 forbids special characters and accents, and spaces and dashes too. Shutterstock accepts the underscore and nothing else besides letters and digits, so a name like harbor_sunrise_01.mov passes both. The CSV finds each clip by the name it was uploaded under, so rename before the upload.

FTP details

• The host is ftp.pond5.com, with your Pond5 username and a separate FTP password of at least eight characters, set under Account, then FTP. Leave the port blank.
• Pond5's instructions mention plain FTP only, where Shutterstock uses FTPS and Adobe Stock SFTP.
• Releases go in their own folder. The FTP article calls it "Release"; the releases page says to create "releases" if none exists. Use the one you find on the server.

Statuses

Price

Video sells on a tiered price structure: the price you enter is one of several factors Pond5 uses to set the list price, and you can choose Let Pond5 set my price. Pond5 pays 30% of each video sale to non-exclusive contributors and 40% to exclusive ones, on the 15th of each month once your balance reaches $25. The full upload walk-through is in how to upload video to Pond5.

What RushPilot does for Pond5

RushPilot is a desktop app for stock video contributors, in private beta with a waiting list. You put your clips in a folder. For each clip, RushPilot:

• looks at five frames of the clip;
• writes the English title of 40 to 80 characters, the description and the keywords Pond5 expects;
• checks the common rejection reasons before anything is sent;
• uploads the clip to Pond5, and to Shutterstock and Adobe Stock with the metadata each of them expects.

The video files stay on your computer. RushPilot makes no promise of acceptance or sales: Pond5's curators still decide on each clip.

Pond5 keywording tool options compared

Each line about a third-party tool comes from its official page, read on 11 October 2026. Prices change, so check them before you pay. Nothing here is ranked.

Since Pond5 suggests keywords for free, what you pay a tool for is mostly the title, the field with the most Pond5 rules: length, language, no codes. Test a few outputs in the free title and keyword checker, and see keywording tools for stock footage for the full comparison. How Pond5 compares with Shutterstock on royalties is in Pond5 vs Shutterstock.

RushPilot pricing

RushPilot charges per clip, from €0.05 to €0.09 depending on the offer. Monthly plans start at €7 for 100 clips, credit packs at €9 for 100 clips, and every new account gets 25 clips free to judge the titles and keywords on its own footage. The details are on the pricing page.