Six thousand assets, judged by people paying for them.
The stock libraries are where the generative work gets marked by strangers with a budget. No curation, no portfolio framing, no explaining the thinking behind it. An image is either licensed or it is not, and the dashboard does not care how much you liked it.
A portfolio is a curated argument.
Every portfolio on the internet, including mine, is a selection. You show the ten pieces that worked and quietly retire everything else. That is not dishonest, but it does mean a portfolio cannot tell you what somebody produces on an average Tuesday.
Stock does not allow the edit. Every asset goes up. The market licenses some and ignores the rest, and the ratio is public on a dashboard I do not control. Across six thousand assets that average says something a showreel structurally cannot: whether the work is actually useful to somebody who has a job to finish today.
It is also where the generative stack gets stress-tested. Prompt engineering, model selection, upscaling and colour finishing all get judged by whether a stranger spends money, which is a considerably harsher critic than a client who already likes you.
Four things, repeatedly.
A prompt is a brief. Vague in, generic out — and generic does not license, because generic is what every other contributor also uploaded.
Volume is cheap at this stage and expensive later. Choosing from forty is a different job from rescuing one.
Upscale, clean the artefacts, grade. Most rejected stock fails on finishing rather than on the idea behind it.
Downloads are the only review that counts. What sells decides what gets made next, not what was satisfying to make.
The same process, pointed at your brand.
You decide what to say, not me.
Generative imagery carries real commercial questions, and the people selling it hardest are usually the ones least interested in raising them.
There are three worth knowing about: what a model was trained on, what rights actually come with the output, and whether your customers would mind knowing a campaign image was generated rather than photographed.
How I handle it. I tell you which assets in a set are generated and which are photographed, every time, in writing. Some brands want that line drawn publicly and some genuinely do not care — both are reasonable positions, and it is your call to make rather than mine to quietly avoid. Where a use case is legally uncomfortable, such as recognisable faces or anything implying endorsement, I will say so and we shoot it instead.