I seem to be on a roll this month with posts. I think it is because I have finished processing all my Hawaii shots and have got those online and I’m waiting for the next project! That is also giving me some time to look at some of the shots I have taken and trying to improve ones that are worthwhile. The first one could have been a great shot of a proud (and wild) cockerel overlooking his territory on...
I currently have 620 images on Fine Art America, although I would be the first to admit that some of the early images I uploaded were probably not very suitable for display purposes. It is too easy to think of what might sell for stock, and just upload that, but in reality, people are looking for something to put on their walls and so you really need to think about what you yourself would be willing to print and frame....
One of the many issues with uploading videos to stock agencies (apart from the sheer size of the files) is the lack of an ability to automatically keyword and describe the files before uploading them. That generally means you need to visit each agency and either upload a csv file with that required information or do a lot of copy and pasting to get each video file ready for submission. On my recent trip to Hawaii I took 31 videos...
I’m still processing images from my recent trip to Maui and Kauai, but as I was going through them I thought about how I find out where to go for the best photo opportunities when you go to a new place. How did I know where to find this lcoation for sunset? I start, before I go, with a guidebook – I know that is old fashioned when you have Google at your fingerprints, but at least I get...
Ever since I got my Sony A7Rii last June, I’ve toyed with the idea of moving more into stock video production. Why? Mainly because the people involved seem to be doing very well, there is less competition (because it is harder) and the introduction of modern SLRs capable of handling 4K video production is opening up a new market for this ultra high resolution images. If you think about it, almost all the images currently in stock agency libraries are...
Since my earlier review of StockSubmitter back in December, I’ve really grown to like the system and it really does save time! As I explained last time, my basic process is to keyword in Lightroom (which is alphabetic order) and then to export the files as Jpegs to a new folder structure ready for uploading. Once I open StockSubmitter I first check to see that the categories have been guessed correctly – they generally are, but it is worth a...
As many readers know I have been using StockUploader for 3 or 4 years and it has always served me well. However, it has not been publicly available for at least 12 months and will be totally unavailable at the end of the year. So what should new stock photographers do? The answer has also become more complex for me because of the need to identify and prioritize the first seven keywords to fit in with Adobe Stock’s process and...
A couple of days ago, I started re-ordering my Adobe Stock keywords. As I explained here, most of my keywords are alphabetic, because that is how Lightroom sorts them. I did meet with Julieanne Kost of Adobe last weekend at Nature Visions, and she has put in a request to the Lightroom product team to come up with a solution for this as it doesn’t appear that Adobe Stock will change their approach. The first big question – is it...
There was a post from Mat Hayward (Adobe Stock rep) on the Microstock Group forum reminding people that the first seven keywords are the most important in the search results on Adobe Stock. I’ve always found this a pain with Fotolia and most of my images there have alphabetic keywords. When Fotolia used to be a low earner, it perhaps didn’t matter much, but things are changing. Being a person that doesn’t like extra work, I decided to test if this...
I wrote about the Microstockr Pro App (currently in free Beta) a few weeks back and have been playing with it since. One thing I noticed that could really help me is the ability to match the same image across all sites and then see the total sales for that image. Why that helped me in particular was that for several years, Fotolia was very harsh on non-people and non-object images. My landscapes and travel images were rejected by the...
