Shutterstock video categories: fill both slots, people first

Shutterstock asks for a category on every clip and allows two. It is easy to fill the first and leave the second, and when a row leaves it empty, the portal fills the second one itself.

On a contributor account we work with, that is how 24 clips of one lot went out under Nature alone, and seven of them showed men in armour fighting. This article covers how to fill both slots on purpose, three matching mistakes we made and fixed, the editorial rule, and the CSV facts you need to get any of it onto the portal.

The 19 video categories

Shutterstock's help centre lists 26 categories, marks seven of them as not available for video, and spells two differently from the portal. The list that matters is the one the portal itself loads for video, read on 2026-09-11. It has 19 entries:

The CSV import accepts the English names, slash included. The ids are what the portal stores, so you will see them if you ever read its responses, but you never need to type them.

Fill both slots, People first

The rule we settled on, after reading how the contributor files clips by hand:

1. A person in frame: People goes first. It is the same fact that decides whether the clip needs a model release, so answer it once and let it set both.
2. An animal clip: Animals/Wildlife and Nature. That is the pair the contributor's own animal clips carry. Their landscapes carry Nature with Holidays, or Buildings/Landmarks with Holidays.
3. Anything else: the categories your keywords actually name, and Nature takes whichever slot is left.

Leaving the second slot to the portal is not a neutral choice: the clips of men fighting in armour, footage about people, went out under Nature.

Matching keywords to categories: three mistakes we fixed

On 2026-09-20 we replayed every row already sent from that account through our own category code: 48 of 104 rows had gone out under Nature alone. Three causes, each worth checking in your own spreadsheet or script.

• A missing category. Our table had no Industrial entry at all, so an industrial plant and a paper pulp mill were filed as Nature.
• Whole-keyword matching. Comparing a term with the whole keyword missed obvious hits: building never met brick building, and rooftops never met rooftop. A city skyline went out as Nature too. Match a term as a whole word inside each keyword instead.
• Denied terms. no people sits on nearly every wildlife clip of that account (it is Getty's keyword for no recognisable people). Matched naively, it filed wildlife clips under People. A denied term is not a term.

One more rule came out of the same replay: read the description only when no keyword names a category. A description mentions a factory in passing, and letting that outrank a keyword you chose would file a geyser under Industrial.

Editorial: one judgement, two fields

Shutterstock takes a recognisable private building, logo or trademark under editorial rights only. With Editorial ticked, the portal's own note (we read it in the French interface; this is our translation) asks for descriptions in the format "City, State/Country - Month Day Year: description".

Four rules follow from what we measured:

• Editorial set to yes and the prefix travel together, or not at all. Six commercial clips on the same account open with a date and a place, carry the review reason eligible_for_editorial_use, and were still pending six months later. What those rows lacked was the Editorial flag, not the prefix.
• The place and the day come from your own records. Rushlot reads them only from the contributor's own title, and holds the clip back by name when the title does not say. A made-up city or date is a false statement about the footage.
• The prefix counts inside the 200 characters the CSV dialog allows. Write the description to fit what is left, then add the prefix.
• Spell the month out in English. Rushlot writes the day without a leading zero.

Getting categories onto the portal: the CSV

Shutterstock does not read metadata embedded in a video. Measured on 2026-09-11 with a probe clip carrying an XMP title, description and keywords written with ExifTool: once processed, its panel showed an empty description, no category and no keywords. So everything goes in through the portal's CSV import, on the Not submitted page.

The files themselves go up over FTPS with explicit TLS, signed in with the account's own e-mail and password. On that account, a delivered file reached the portal about two seconds after its transfer ended.

The CSV headers must match the portal's own sample exactly, in English even in a French interface:

Filename,Description,Keywords,Categories,Editorial,Mature content,illustration

Note Mature content and illustration. The help centre capitalises them differently; the sample is what the portal accepts, and its dialog says the names must match perfectly.

Because an apply overwrites, apply a CSV only to clips you have just delivered, never over a clip you have already edited by hand.

Two limits from Shutterstock's help centre are worth planning around: 100 video clips per rolling 7 days, and unsubmitted uploads are deleted after 21 days. Uploading is not submitting. A person presses Submit on the portal.

A short checklist

• Person in frame: People first.
• Animal: Animals/Wildlife, then Nature.
• Never leave the second slot empty.
• Match whole words inside keywords, and skip no people and other denials.
• Editorial: flag set to yes, prefix from your own records, all inside 200 characters.
• CSV headers exactly as the portal's sample.

Rushlot fills both slots by these rules and writes the CSV row with the sample's headers, one row per clip it has just delivered. You review every clip before it is sent, and the Submit button on Shutterstock stays yours.