Is AI all that it is supposed to be?
A bit of a detour away from photography with an exploration of several hours of time-wasting advice from CoPilot and Google Gemini and the implications for AI adoption
Category: “How-to” articles
The best of my explanatory “how to do it” articles
AI Keywording – a new contender, Cyberstock
Keywording for stock photography is critical to success but a real pain to do. Can AI keywording apps do this function for you and help you earn real money from photography?
Selling photos with digital art effects as prints
I enjoy using the Jixipix digital painting apps and create images from my photos that I sell via the various print on demand platforms such as FAA and Pictorem
Lightroom Classic Keywording error 1555
I’m writing this post in case readers of these articles come across a similar issue and so can see the steps I have taken to try to resolve it. So far unsuccessfully, I’m afraid. If you have any suggestions, please let me (and other people with this issue) know in the comments. I’ve been running Lightroom Classic for many years on Windows 10 and now 11 and the app is up to date. I have increasingly been seeing an error...
Food Photography handbook
One of my favorite stock photographers is Annie from Milleflore Images in Australia. I’ve known her since the early 2010s and have been constantly impressed by the skill and dedication that she applies to her stock photography and videography, particularly in the area of food photography. Not only does she style her images immaculately, but she also manages to infuse every image with the senses of smell and taste that you rarely get from a simple photograph of a plate...
AI driven keywording
I’ve decided to write about keywording this morning. For some time, I’ve used the IMS Keyworder website application which allows you to insert a few keywords into their web page and then choose which images match your particular one and then select the keywords from that appear in the various stock agencies against those images. I found that you can quite quickly identify photographs which match your image and then quickly choose the keywords that you think match the image...
Update on my Fine Art approach
It has been quite some time since I updated my thoughts on how to sell your images as prints. I, of course, need to mention that I wrote an eBook about this and much of the information in that is still valuable (I believe) to anyone thinking of trying to sell their work as prints rather than stock photos. As I will report next week, December will likely turn out to be a pretty poor month in terms of stock...
Selling physical prints in an Etsy Shop
I’ve experimented in the past with trying to sell digital downloads from Etsy with zero success and so I made all the products inactive and forgot about it! But recently I was following a discussion on the Fine Art America forum about using FAA as the production partner for products sold on Etsy and some people reported some interesting success in selling via an Etsy Store. Etsy, of course, used to be entirely home-made products but now they allow you...
Manufacturing Costs between Pictorem and Fine Art America
I’ve written a post about my experience in creating an Etsy store to sell metal, canvas and paper prints on the Etsy platform. The process would be that someone buys a print on Etsy (I hope!) and I get the order. I then place an order for that print on either Pictorem or Fine Art America and they ship the item to the buyer’s address. Easy! But how to price those prints on Etsy? I decided to focus on just...
Fine Art America adds AI created Description and Keywords
Just a quick post in case you weren’t aware of this. Fine Art America has released a new feature that automatically creates a description and keywords for images that are uploaded without them. An image that already has those pieces of metadata pre-filled are not impacted, but if you upload an image without any metadata, or with just the title completed, their AI system will create the missing ones. I understood that they used a title (if present) to help...
