Contrary to popular belief, file approval at iStockphoto is not done by coin toss. We don't show photographs to babies to see if they cry. We don't reject every picture of a cat.

There are now forty iStock Inspectors around the world. It's their job to dig into the Queue and give every single submission the thorough eye-balling that it deserves. Different Inspectors bring different sets of skills; we have Flash gurus, film experts, and Vector pros. Some of our Inspectors have been looking at files since the beginning, and some just dropped into the Queue within the last month. And all of them are trained, re-trained, quizzed, and rated, so you never need to ask "Who Inspects the Inspectors?"

But who are these people, anyway? Some of them you know from the forums, and some of them you've probably never heard from. We tracked (almost) all of them down, and gave them the hard questions. Or at least the stock, easy to answer questions. A few of them talked our ears off: catch Aldra on shoe shopping, jjrd on "challenging structures", and the usually recalictrant saintcaffeine on, um, everything. So have a read and get to know the people on the other end of the pipe.