Adobe Stock metadata rules
Checked against official docs Columns and limits checked against the agency's official template, but we have not submitted a test upload ourselves.
Short titles, no commas allowed, and categories are numbers 1 to 21
keyword
- Up to 49 keywords, ordered by importance — the first 10 carry the most weight.
- Free-text keywords — no controlled vocabulary.
title
- Maximum 70 characters, and no commas at all — the CSV uses commas as its separator.
- Editorial is the exception: the date and place must sit in the same sentence, so it may run past 70 characters.
Categories
- A number from 1 to 21 — one category only.
- 1 Animals · 2 Buildings and Architecture · 3 Business · 4 Drinks · 5 The Environment
- 6 States of Mind · 7 Food · 8 Graphic Resources · 9 Hobbies and Leisure · 10 Industry
- 11 Landscapes · 12 Lifestyle · 13 People · 14 Plants and Flowers · 15 Culture and Religion
- 16 Science · 17 Social Issues · 18 Sports · 19 Technology · 20 Transport · 21 Travel
- Medical and clinical images usually belong in 16 Science rather than 13 People when the subject is the treatment or the equipment.
CSV
- The official template's columns are Filename, Title, Keywords, Category, Releases.
- The file must stay under 1 MB and 5,000 rows.
- Using Excel outside the US, save as CSV UTF-8.
editorial
- Put the date and place inside the Title sentence.
- You must tick "This is Illustrative Editorial content" on the website — the CSV has no column for it.
- Only illustrative editorial is accepted — no recognisable faces and no rights-restricted events.
A tool that does it for you
KeywordStock produces the title, description, keywords and CSV in Adobe Stock's exact format automatically, reading your files on your own computer — no uploads.
Download the app