My current workflow

It is a long time since I wrote about my workflow and it has probably evolved over time, so an update might be welcome for some newer readers. Here is the essence:

1. I always take my images in Raw format and import into Lightroom. Because I keyword all the images I think are worthwhile, having a structure on my hard-drive with topics or particular shoots isn’t necessary and so I use a simple Year and then Month structure:
2.  I have some fast SSDs in my computer (Windows 10) and keep the Lightroom catalog on my C Drive, which is the fastest drive.
3. I keep my current year images on another 500G SSD and move a completed year’s images to a normal hard drive (F: in the photo above) which is 4TB and large enough to hold all my images back through 1999. I do use a backup program (Oops!Backup) that copies the latest versions of any of the images onto another internal hard drive and I do make backups onto an external drive from time to time. I find that having the Lightroom catalog on a fast drive helps the response time of the program such that I rarely have any issues, even with 40 Mpixel Raw files.
4. After a shoot, I import all the images and generally move through them editing the ones that I think are worthwhile images as I go. Because I don’t tend to take lots of images of the same subject, I can usually see which of a small group of similars is the best (and I often process more than one to get different perpectives) and when an image has been edited I flag it. If I take an image into Photoshop to remove some product name or make more complex changes, I save the resultant PSD file back into the same folder and give it a red color label so that I can see at a glance which are the images that have been processed externally to Lightroom. I would flag that as well so that I can easily filter for my chosen images.
5. After I have been through the shoot and edited the “good” photos, I start again and do the keywording and describing. This is a step that I usually break into several sessions as it is really important to work hard at this! I currently use Keyword.io for getting a good start at the main keywords, as I find it pretty quick and accurate. I don’t just take all their suggested keywords – if I have a series of images in the same city, I would first pick the keywords that are likely to be common across all the images – things like the city name, country, cityscape, skyline, town, building exterior etc. – and put those with a general title and description in the first of the images from that city and then “sync” them across all the other images. I use the Map function in LR to pick the location of the shot as well and copy that across if the images are taken in the same location. Even if they aren’t, it is often better to put the location in all of them and then change specific ones. Having a location already recorded means that the map comes up with that location highlighted and you just have to move to the correct place. After my several sessions of keywording, I have all the images ready for the next stage.
6. In this pass, I also do any editorial keywording. I mark my editorial shots with “one star” just as a way to identify them and I add “editorial” to the keywords so I can search across multiple folders if necessary. As I mentioned a few weeks back, I realized that Shutterstock and the other sites accept simpler editorial captions and so I use those simpler formats to speed things up.
7. Now onto the export. I keep all the JPGs on a different hard drive to the original photos to provide a bit more security and on that hard drive I keep a very similar folder structure of years and months. I normally export images at 4500 pixels on the longest side (although a stitched panorama could be 7500 pixels or so). Once I am happy with the keywording, I export all the flagged images into the current month’s export folder. I use the current month rather than the month they were taken so that I know which images I uploaded in a particular month. So currently I am exporting all my images into 2017: December.
8. So far, all these steps would be pretty identical regardless of whether you are uploading to one agency or multiple. As you know, I upload to multiple agencies – 16 in total, and I also upload all my images to all those agencies. I know that some people believe your “better” photos should go to more expensive agencies such as Alamy, but I’m now firmly of the view that all images go to all agencies. I’ve done some experiments on whether people who see an image on Alamy, say, then search for that same image and buy it at a cheaper site but I have found no evidence of that. So how do I get all my images onto 16 different sites without creating a big workload for myself. I’ve tried FileZilla and various sorts of parallel FTP programs, but you still have to fiddle with categories and often visit each site in turn to submit the images. As you probably know, agencies change their submission processes (as Shutterstock recently did) and so you sometimes have to learn new processes as well. A big pain! So instead of that, I now use Stock Submitter. Yes, this is a paid program, although a certain number of uploads each month are free if you are a starter, but it saves me so much time and energy that I happily pay for the program. The recent change to Shutterstock did create a glitch for a few days as the developer came up with a new design, but he did that quickly and the program automatically updates itself. There is a ton of work in keeping this program up to date and so I firmly believe the developer deserves something for all his work. I’ve written in depth about using Stock Submitter here on my blog, so I’ll only mention the basic steps here.
9. So I next open StockSubmitter and browse to the folder containing my new images:
10. It immediately shows the thumbnails and in this screen I select similar pictures, confirm that the program has guessed appropriate categories for them and then go to the advanced keyword editor to sort the keywords into some sort of priority order for Adobe and Alamy. Even if the individual files have different keywords, you can still work on multiple images at once, moving the important keywords to the front of the list, and the program will appropriately sort the order in each individual file. It doesn’t put the same words in each image – it moves the keyword to the top only if that image has that specific keyword already. I then click on the iStock Terms button, and that brings up a new screen where I can match my words against the iStock vocabulary. The program remembers my earlier choices and so that becomes much faster and easier with time. Clicking save puts all the newly ordered keywords into the JPEGs and stores the iStock terms in its database. It doesn’t take me very long to work through the images here and I’m now ready to submit to all agencies including those like iStock, Adobe and Alamy that have special requirements. There is a checkbox in StockSubmitter for editorial images and so I check that for any of the images that I have decided are editorial. This checkbox stops the program from uploading those images to sites that don’t take editorial shots – another time saver.
11. I also have my model and property releases stored in the program and so I can add a model release very simply to the images that need it. You can see some in the screenshot above with MR in the corner of the thumbnail. The program remembers when it has already submitted a model release to an agency so it can select one that is already on file. Another big time saver!
12. Now it is as simple as selecting the images I want to upload, make sure the agencies are all selected and click “Upload Selected”. It really is as simple as that. The program uploads them all using FTP (or whatever the site requires) and once that is done, it makes visits every 15 minutes to submit any images that are ready for submission, adding the categories, model or property releases, editorial markings etc. and then submits them. The only one that is slightly different is Alamy, where the images need to go through QC first. When I get the email from Alamy telling me the images have been accepted, I simply restart Stock Submitter again and it completes the Alamy process by marking the important keywords as Supertags. Again, no need for me to visit the site.
13. Although this is a different topic, the program also handles video and automatically submits keywords along with the videos on my selected sites. To be honest, I don’t know what I did before I found this program – it is funny how careful we stock photographers are with our money when something like this can save us so much time.
14. I don’t really track the success/failure of my uploads, except on Shutterstock and Adobe where I sometimes look at that they have accepted and if I made a mistake somewhere, I might fix it and resubmit to those sites. I don’t bother with the other sites.

Well, that is it – a lot of reading here, but I hope it will help you. As usual, ask me anything you don’t understand!