Making Money from Travel Photography – Part 3

Parts 1 and 2 of this extended post have discussed what to take on a travel vacation and then how to select and process images on your return. I’ll now turn to keywording and uploading the images.

I finished processing most of the images in mid October and eventually ended up with 389 images that I thought were worth keywording. I generally follow a simple rule about what is going to be “editorial” and hence only uploaded to my own site, Alamy, Corbis and Zoonar and the rest, which go to all sites. Because of tight restrictions on images with people needing a model release on some of those sites, anything with a person in it, however small, goes into the RM/Editorial bin unless I decide to clone out that person. Then, anything with modern property that is recognizable and likely to need a property release goes into RM/Editorial as well. With that rule in place, I ended up with 117 in RM/Editorial. I generally start at the beginning, and copy some standard keywords across the whole set – in this case Spain, Europe, Travel, Destination, Tourism and Stock Photo. I added that last one because my own stock site doesn’t automatically add those words and they probably help with an appropriate Google search. Then I go through each image and try to describe what it is, what it represent, where it is, any proper description of the location, whether there are people present (nobody or “people in background” being the most usual phrases). I try not to put anything too flowery in there – just the words that I would use to find this image. Writing a reasonably long description often helps throw up a few words as well – it is strange how the act of typing the description makes you hone down exactly what an image is about. So this one of the Parador hotel in Toledo would be keyworded as:

Parador de Toledo with swimming pool and dramatic overview of the city of Toledo, Spain, Europe

“balcony, building exterior, city, dramatic, editorial, europe, evening, hotel, lodging, overlook, overlooking, parador, Parador de Toledo, people in background, spain, stock photo, swimming pool, toledo, tourism, travel, view”

I also add the GPS coordinates from the Map function in Lightroom and type in the Sublocation field with the city, state, country to provide one more help in finding it.

If I have more than one image of the place, I then “sync” the metadata to the other files, but I always look at each one in turn to strip out erroneous keywords and add something more specific if needed. I obviously miss things and after doing this hour after hour, you can get a bit shell shocked, but that is the plan!

I’ve been working on this on and off for the past two weeks – doing 2 or 3 hours at a time, and so the total time put into keywording those 389 images must be about 40 hours I guess. Nobody said this was easy!

Looking at each image as you keyword gives you another chance to check the exposure and develop settings and I sometimes make tweaks as I go. Finally, if I come across an image that I just can’t get enthusiastic about keywording, I discard it. No point in working on something that you don’t think has much chance of selling. I processed this one, but when I looked at again, I just decided it had such little interest to anyone that it might as well go into the discarded pile:

Not worth keywording

With all my images keyworded, I first select and export the RF ones into one folder and the RM ones to another. I generally use 4500px as the longest length and quality of 90, with sRGB as the color space and no sharpening.

I use StockUploader to upload all the files to the agencies – it works great for me – just sit back and let it do its stuff. Then it is a case of going to the agencies in turn and submitting them. I generally start with the bigger sellers – Shutterstock, Fotolia, Dreamstime, and am reasonably careful with the categories, but I don’t waste time getting them exactly right. If there is a “Travel: Europe: Spain” choice, that will work for most of the images.

In the next installment, I’ll write about what happened – what was my success rate in getting them accepted.

If you are interested, I now have all the Spanish travel images online on my own stock agency BackyardStockPhotos.com. They aren’t in any particular order – the RM/editorial ones are on the later pages as I uploaded those first.