MicrostockGroup

Hi,

I've been submitting to Macrostock / Midstock agencies for quite a while now, but don't have any images in microstock.

I'm now preparing my first submission (about 50 images, mainly photography & 3d renderings). My general workflow is to organize & keyword all images with standard IPTC fields, so that I can easily submit the images to a number of microstock sites – including any potential newbies in the future. Not rocket science, I know – and I'm sure there's a lot of people here who do it like that.

As I'm not familiar with submitting to ANY of the microstock sites, I've got a few questions, which I hope  you can answer. All about submitting/keywording:

Besides the additional work of uploading: Is there a reason why I should NOT submit to "as many agencies as possible" (just in theory)? I don't mean exclusivity vs multi-agency. I mean 5 agencies vs 20 agencies.
The reason why I'm asking is because I've seen a few threads here where people said they pulled their images from greedy agencies. And because of one thread I came across is this one – is this something to be aware of (apart from FT):
http://www.microstockgroup.com/fotolia-com/return-to-start-fotolia-reserves-right-to-put-you-back-at-white-ranking/

Are there any agencies who don't support IPTC keywording / captioning – or who have an awkward 'custom IPTC' system similar to Alamy (with its 'Essential' keywords,...)? Or agencies who want each keyword to be painstakingly classified (particularly keywords with different meanings)?

If I end up submitting to many agencies at the same time, I won't be able to check if my type of content is already abundant with a particular agency. "Everyone gets everything". Do agencies care & put you in the 'bad books', I mean do they expect contributors to research in advance what an agency might want? (BTW I don't mean "pretty flowers, white cartoon figure on white background,...).

Many thanks!

I upload the same title/keywords/description to all agencies, perhaps i'm missing out on some subtle improvisation, but they all seem to accept pretty much the same set of keywords if you follow some guidelines:

1) you'll find yourself deleting keywords at istock during their disambiguation
2) the agencies that don't want plurals seem strip them if you have the singular
3) Do not start the title or description with 'a', 'an' or '1' etc.
4) Make your description at least 7 words long.
5) Add at least 10 keywords, but not more than 50.
6) Duplicate all the keywords used in the title and description into the keywords field (some agencies don't search on the title field)
7) Take care with special characters, letters with accents, quotes and even apostrophes (i try to leave them out all together) these can either truncate the description or lead to unusual characters being displayed - so always have a quick check that all your metadata has been read in correctly after you have uploaded.

have a look at http://blog.keywordsmart.com for some info about each agency and its handling of keywords

and for streamlining microstock uploads have a look at http://microstockinsider.com/guides/uploading-microstock-images and the rest of the workflow section

I'd stick with 10-12 agencies - any more than that and the low earning sites don't justify the income (your photos might be better than mine, your time might be worth less etc)