Backyard Silver Latest Posts

Microstock Analytics – Deep Dive into your sales

In previous posts I have reviewed the use of Microstockr Pro for monitoring your sales and how I used it to find images that were selling well but missing from one of the main agencies. There is an alternative application on the market that promises far more detail about your portfolio and so I decided to investigate Microstock Analytics in more detail. This is a far more complex system aimed at really understanding which shots are selling and why, whereas...

StockSubmitter – an elegant replacement for StockUploader

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...

Earnings from stock photography in November 2016

Another month goes by – amazingly quickly it seems. I must be getting used to the new normal of Shutterstock – fewer downloads in total and far fewer enhanced and single sales – which really hits my earnings from that site, but on the upside, Adobe Stock continues to perform nicely. Overall, I increased by a $120 over October to reach a total of $2163 for November. With Thanksgiving being a big US holiday, that isn’t too bad. Pity December...

Adobe Stock keyword order

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...

Adobe Stock – prioritize your keywords

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...

NMAAHC – always be ready with your camera

I spent the weekend at the Nature Visions annual photography expo held in Northern Virginia. It is held each November and attracts some of the best speakers in the industry – Bob Krist was great and Julieanne Kost from Adobe is one of the best speakers on Lightroom and Photoshop that I have come across! If you are able to attend one of these Expo’s, it will be worth your while. However, that is not my main reason for writing....

Another sale on Fine Art America

The previous post about Microstockr Pro reminded me to blog about another sale on Fine Art America. FAA sales don’t come round very often, but it is always interesting to see what sells, and this time it was one of those sunrise shots of the Washington Monument from the Lincoln Memorial: This one sold as a rolled print for the buyer to frame and resulted in a $25 profit. Everytime I get a sale at FAA, I think that I...

Microstockr Pro – helping my sales

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...

Updating my Fine Art portfolio website

Back in 2014 I decided to create my own “Fine Art” portfolio website. It was not particularly to sell images from the site (as I know how hard that is!), but to have somewhere where friends could look at some of my better photographic efforts. I decided to use the Photocrati Theme and explained the process back in this post. I decided that it was the best wordpress photography theme that I could find and at the time, I thought...