MicrostockGroup

Is it cost-effective?  Frowned upon?  Just looking for others' opinions on the subject.

I looked into it at one point and basically the quality was crap.  Maybe I'm just too picky, but I tested several places and none of them were up to my standards.

It is right under this post, advertising- JaincoTech.

it someone else's doing your keywording, you'll end up in front of your computer as well, pressing F5 and reading forums all day long - so you'd better do the keywording yourself  

well, I'm talking for myself anyway

Jainco says "JaincoTech has a well-balanced team of experts in processing the stock photo services comprising of Scanning, Raw Processing, Color Correction, Dust spotting and Photo Keywording."
It looks like this would be ok for film stuff but once the image is digital what does this service really offer besides keywording?  Color correction and dust spotting are necessary first steps but removing logos, editing out stray branches from a landscape or a blemish on the skin will still need to be done by you afterwords won't it?

Hi,
"Anybody used dreamstime keywording for 50cents ?"

I newer figured out it is just once or each time $.50 ?

Dreamstime keywording is .40c per picture. Very reasonable rate for a good service.

Never. To me the post-processing is as fundamental to the finished 'product' as the photography itself. Even in the days of b&w photography there was the expression that "the real photography is done in the darkroom".

The major skill in microstock, apart from the idea and the actual shoot, is identifying which images to upload and exactly how to crop them for optimum impact at thumbnail size.

I timed myself the other day and it took me one hour to choose, crop and post-process 4 images, including keywording. For a fairly healthy output of say 100 images per month that only represents 25 hours work. I quite enjoy it too, particularly if I get good results. It's not hard work and can be done in between times whilst listening to music or half-watching sport on the tv.

Leaf, how much does it cost to do all this? I can't figure out from the site.

Hi All

My name is Jazz and I am the President of JaincoTech.  This is my first submission on this site so please do excuse any social rules I am not be following.  Since our name was mentioned in this conversation string and you are talking about outsourcing post production work I thought it would be ok for me to respond.

Firstly: My apologizes for the website.  We started it 6 years ago when we only serviced the Stock industry.  Since then we have simply been adding pages to highlight many of the other verticals we support including Wedding, Restoration, Real-Estate, Retouching, Retail and so on.  As it happens, last week we started a formal organized effort to revamp the entire site to make it a lot more simple, hopefully you will see signs of that over the next couple of weeks as we phase in our updates.
We do have a functioning pricing tab for all of our stock services (http://www.imagingserviceprofessionals.com/index.php?fuseaction=service.onlyview&rc=JTS) but some of the services have many options so it can seem overwhelming at first.  Once you’ve actually used it you will see it offers a lot of customization and flexibility.  As such I would be happy to talk to anyone that has questions on this.  I can be reached at 1 440 519 0100 or [email protected].

In relation to the processing questions.  We work with photographers that only send us 100 images a month to be keyworded to leading photographers/agencies that send us a 1000 images and videos per day for Raw Processing, Color Correction, Dust Spotting, Retouching and online submissions.  We stand behind our work so we never like to think that meeting your quantity requirements will be an issue.  The only real questions for our customers are:
1)   Are you looking to increase the number of images you shoot?
2)   Are your looking to free up more time?
3)   How much control are you willing to release so we can determine the right set of services?
4)   Are you prepared to work with a company the same way you would work with an employee to ensure we understand your requirements

The rest is easy - easier!

Hi Jazz, I'm considering your keyword service and checked your pricing tab, I'm missing an option between lowres Jpeg and Tiff as Getty already demands Jpegs for final submission I would love to send you the final Jpegs (which are about 5MB in filesize) to do the keywording but the sending price for Tiffs are way too high to consider for me.

Sorry for the late response
The way our customers work is they typically want one of the following 2 options
1)   an excel spreadsheet with separate columns for all the metadata requirements for the specified stock agency(s) – this will require you sending us low res JPEG files
2)   The KW embedded into the IPTC fields – this will require you sending us high res TIFF or JPEG files

The advantage of 2) is that you have to do little work other than submit the images.  The disadvantage is that you have now hard coded the KW standard for one adjency into your distribution images.  And as we all know most of the stock agencies have very different keywording standards.

The advantage of 1) is that
•   your images remain agency independent
•   all your KW requirements are managed through the spreadsheet.  This is great for those that are submitting images to multiple agencies
•   it is easier and faster for you to review the KW of your images in a spreadsheet
•   because we are working with low res images, the images are faster for you to transmit, faster for us to load for processing, and there is no return network traffic because we are sending back the excel spreadsheet instead of all the high res images.

Obviously we can do both ways and I have updated the form to accept high res JPEG’s but most of our customers do prefer sending low res JPEG’s and getting an excel sheet in return.
I would however also say that the reason we charge for FTP is we typically get 50MB files.  5MB files are much more manageable and I have set it up that a file under 15MB is considered low res and so can be uploaded/FTPed and downloaded/FTP’ed for free.

Hope this helps and thanks for the feedback, look forward to processing a job for you and please contact me directly if you have any further questions – [email protected]

Jazz

@jazz: thanks sounds very cool!
@ppdd: that is a cool workflow unfortunately GraphicConverter is Mac-only and eight years ago I throw my last Mac in the garbage since then I'm Windows-only. Are you aware of  a program that does the same on a Windows-platform?