I'm a bit biased since I built both, but for keywording have a look at https://www.keyword.io/tool/stock-photo-research and for uploading at https://dropstock.io and let me know what you think

OK, didn't see that concern, my bad.

Those APIs only expose the amount of sales/downloads but there are no details about what kind of license, resolution, .... let alone amount of money earned.

That's not a matter of lax security but agencies putting in the effort of making this data available for third parties to sell more through resellers and integrations into big publishers software solutions. So it's in the interest of the artists, too.

Furthermore you can't see aggregated statistics per artist (you can just sum up sales on their assets you know about) or track over time (unless you want to do the delta between intervals). It's interesting to see the spread between artists' portfolios, some having a few dozen pictures, others have tens of thousands.
Apart from curiosity and vanity, I don't really see a point publishing such numbers, so I wont.

Sorry for the confusion, hope this helped clarifying

It's a mix of major and minor agencies. Feel free to read through their tech documentation yourself, it's all openly available, but please understand that I won't give any details to make it easier for the competition to copy the tool

Some agencies do publish those numbers in their APIs, although you may not see those on their websites.

First of all a big disclaimer: I am not selling photos myself so all I say is from looking at statistics and educated guesses.

I totally agree that quality > quantity and to be very clear: Keywording tools should be used to find more _relevant_ keywords, not just max out the amount of allowed keywords.

That doesn't mean, that you shouldn't add very *generic* keywords, too, though.

For the fun of it I just looked for the most frequent keywords in the database, see end of post.

12.5% of images have the keyword "background". Further analysis shows, that 79.566% of assets with that keyword have 0 sales while 80.076% of ALL assets have 0 sales. Now I don't want to do the math to test if that's scientifically significant, but I would make the case that generic keywords don't hurt your sales. Other top keywords rank around 79.5 - 80.5, too.

Which makes sense to me intuitively - you will never rank for "background" or if your CTR would be crap, but your average buyer won't search just for "background" but for "dense forest background" - where your picture "dense forest" picture will get its chance once you add the generic "background" keyword.

(Another shameless pluck: check out http://www.keyword.io/tool/fotolia-longtail-finder to get ideas of actual search phrases based on fotolias's autosuggest. It's far from being as good as google's though, so you might want to have a look at that, too...)


Here's some raw data of the 100 most frequent keywords:

[
          {
            "key": "background",
            "doc_count": 4591388
          },
          {
            "key": "white",
            "doc_count": 3987768
          },
          {
            "key": "nature",
            "doc_count": 2484515
          },
          {
            "key": "isolated",
            "doc_count": 2435124
          },
          {
            "key": "beautiful",
            "doc_count": 2413848
          },
          {
            "key": "people",
            "doc_count": 2229395
          },
          {
            "key": "design",
            "doc_count": 2127786
          },
          {
            "key": "illustration",
            "doc_count": 1904740
          },
          {
            "key": "blue",
            "doc_count": 1888078
          },
          {
            "key": "green",
            "doc_count": 1886371
          },
          {
            "key": "young",
            "doc_count": 1874181
          },
          {
            "key": "woman",
            "doc_count": 1753721
          },
          {
            "key": "red",
            "doc_count": 1703703
          },
          {
            "key": "person",
            "doc_count": 1669872
          },
          {
            "key": "female",
            "doc_count": 1655572
          },
          {
            "key": "summer",
            "doc_count": 1603761
          },
          {
            "key": "beauty",
            "doc_count": 1568581
          },
          {
            "key": "travel",
            "doc_count": 1563713
          },
          {
            "key": "color",
            "doc_count": 1561565
          },
          {
            "key": "business",
            "doc_count": 1536681
          },
          {
            "key": "on",
            "doc_count": 1534946
          },
          {
            "key": "food",
            "doc_count": 1525440
          },
          {
            "key": "symbol",
            "doc_count": 1462259
          },
          {
            "key": "vector",
            "doc_count": 1444441
          },
          {
            "key": "happy",
            "doc_count": 1442463
          },
          {
            "key": "concept",
            "doc_count": 1404698
          },
          {
            "key": "black",
            "doc_count": 1355581
          },
          {
            "key": "old",
            "doc_count": 1328315
          },
          {
            "key": "girl",
            "doc_count": 1328268
          },
          {
            "key": "of",
            "doc_count": 1319744
          },
          {
            "key": "sky",
            "doc_count": 1319360
          },
          {
            "key": "closeup",
            "doc_count": 1314140
          },
          {
            "key": "caucasian",
            "doc_count": 1306044
          },
          {
            "key": "in",
            "doc_count": 1288970
          },
          {
            "key": "healthy",
            "doc_count": 1281133
          },
          {
            "key": "art",
            "doc_count": 1268722
          },
          {
            "key": "man",
            "doc_count": 1267496
          },
          {
            "key": "natural",
            "doc_count": 1241623
          },
          {
            "key": "abstract",
            "doc_count": 1221299
          },
          {
            "key": "portrait",
            "doc_count": 1202016
          },
          {
            "key": "adult",
            "doc_count": 1143252
          },
          {
            "key": "fresh",
            "doc_count": 1126741
          },
          {
            "key": "water",
            "doc_count": 1102621
          },
          {
            "key": "with",
            "doc_count": 1089499
          },
          {
            "key": "style",
            "doc_count": 1071221
          },
          {
            "key": "architecture",
            "doc_count": 1053418
          },
          {
            "key": "decoration",
            "doc_count": 1051273
          },
          {
            "key": "yellow",
            "doc_count": 1034675
          },
          {
            "key": "male",
            "doc_count": 1029181
          },
          {
            "key": "landscape",
            "doc_count": 1020224
          },
          {
            "key": "sign",
            "doc_count": 1015971
          },
          {
            "key": "modern",
            "doc_count": 1014797
          },
          {
            "key": "outdoor",
            "doc_count": 997496
          },
          {
            "key": "vintage",
            "doc_count": 993881
          },
          {
            "key": "pattern",
            "doc_count": 987256
          },
          {
            "key": "cute",
            "doc_count": 981877
          },
          {
            "key": "lifestyle",
            "doc_count": 980955
          },
          {
            "key": "holiday",
            "doc_count": 979195
          },
          {
            "key": "and",
            "doc_count": 977286
          },
          {
            "key": "texture",
            "doc_count": 968744
          },
          {
            "key": "the",
            "doc_count": 961560
          },
          {
            "key": "colorful",
            "doc_count": 959809
          },
          {
            "key": "view",
            "doc_count": 948446
          },
          {
            "key": "light",
            "doc_count": 941141
          },
          {
            "key": "nobody",
            "doc_count": 937180
          },
          {
            "key": "fashion",
            "doc_count": 921896
          },
          {
            "key": "tourism",
            "doc_count": 888435
          },
          {
            "key": "icon",
            "doc_count": 885558
          },
          {
            "key": "outdoors",
            "doc_count": 884011
          },
          {
            "key": "brown",
            "doc_count": 880305
          },
          {
            "key": "building",
            "doc_count": 875284
          },
          {
            "key": "city",
            "doc_count": 867419
          },
          {
            "key": "graphic",
            "doc_count": 864338
          },
          {
            "key": "one",
            "doc_count": 853655
          },
          {
            "key": "bright",
            "doc_count": 840991
          },
          {
            "key": "retro",
            "doc_count": 839586
          },
          {
            "key": "attractive",
            "doc_count": 834603
          },
          {
            "key": "hand",
            "doc_count": 833679
          },
          {
            "key": "health",
            "doc_count": 830408
          },
          {
            "key": "technology",
            "doc_count": 819292
          },
          {
            "key": "day",
            "doc_count": 817106
          },
          {
            "key": "wooden",
            "doc_count": 781709
          },
          {
            "key": "object",
            "doc_count": 777029
          },
          {
            "key": "traditional",
            "doc_count": 770831
          },
          {
            "key": "smiling",
            "doc_count": 769664
          },
          {
            "key": "fun",
            "doc_count": 768681
          },
          {
            "key": "plant",
            "doc_count": 767075
          },
          {
            "key": "pretty",
            "doc_count": 760217
          },
          {
            "key": "wood",
            "doc_count": 738521
          },
          {
            "key": "face",
            "doc_count": 725763
          },
          {
            "key": "smile",
            "doc_count": 716028
          },
          {
            "key": "spring",
            "doc_count": 713376
          },
          {
            "key": "season",
            "doc_count": 703530
          },
          {
            "key": "tree",
            "doc_count": 698072
          },
          {
            "key": "sea",
            "doc_count": 686473
          },
          {
            "key": "paper",
            "doc_count": 681462
          },
          {
            "key": "europe",
            "doc_count": 680923
          },
          {
            "key": "culture",
            "doc_count": 667678
          },
          {
            "key": "animal",
            "doc_count": 665415
          },
          {
            "key": "home",
            "doc_count": 659297
          }
        ]

[Edited to put the data into a code section]

Hi,

you may want to try my free tool: http://www.keyword.io/tool/stock-photo-research which shows you views&sales stats based on keywords on 30+ million photos, videos and vector graphics across multiple agencies.

No # of searches though, sorry.

Yes, we'll have to put a (reasonable) price tag on this at some point, first we want to make sure this works absolutely flawlessly. We recently enabled video uploads and that's bringing a whole new set of challenges to the game.

Luckily, there's no need for us to rush, that's no startup but a small side project  scratching our own needs, so we prioritise on making it as reliable (and thus hands-off) as possible before we start looking into covering costs.

Oh btw, I recently launched this: http://www.keyword.io/tool/stock-photo-research

It extracts keywords and statistics of views and sales from 33+ million images, vectors and videos from multiple agencies, so this might be useful for keywording and research.

So you can pick your keywords and niches not only based on how frequent they are, but also how well they sell.

And yes, I did the some meta-analysis on this which confirms that the more keywords you have, the more sales you get. So you really should pick 40+ keywords per file. Just make sure they're relevant, otherwise they most likely will hurt your ranking in the agencies search engines.

Happy keyword hunting

Video upload is live!

Enable Video for all agencies you want to upload to, drop video files (up to 4GB) into your upload folder and that's it!

Please note that it might take quite a while for uploads to start and finish, we'll upload videos with a limited bandwidth to ensure stable image upload for the rest of the users. We'll monitor how this works and appreciate your feedback - we're still in free beta mode

Well, not everybody has a fibre connection and not everybody wants to use StockSubmitter or be limited to the handful of agencies they support. I can't really comment on StockSubmitter since we don't get the beta to work reliably on Mac.

Our selling point is that we allow one-click, reliable upload to every agency that supports FTP while optimising your bandwidth and taking care of backups. Platform independent, no installation, no connection- or server issues.

For example we see tons of errors where FTP-servers don't accept new files because their disks ran full or you hit some other limit or transient error. That means you have to remember to retry next day. dropstock.io does that automatically for you.

How useful that is depends on your connection, number of files and agencies and what your time is worth to you. If you spend an hour a month in front of your FTP software or upload pictures through some dodgy public WiFi or upload through your limited cell plan you'll see the appeal.

If StockSubmitter comes up with something similar eventually that would be healthy competition and the users will decide what they prefer.

Oops, thanks, fixing it 

Just added some description to the columns headers that are visible when you hover over the table header. Thanks a lot for the feedback, that was a big miss on our side!

We strictly focus on the uploading part. I agree there's lots of potential to optimise the actual submission things, but automating and maintaining that for every single agency's website and workflow just isn't feasible.

I do think however, that uploading tons of files to tons of destinations through FTP isn't efficient time- and bandwidth wise. Of course you can upload files with FTP easily enough. But it tends to get cumbersome when uploads start to fail and your bandwidth is split because you upload each file a dozen times to different agencies.

Of course this largely depends on the amount of photos, agencies and your available bandwidth and internet stability. Many of our users are now saving them tens of thousands of manual file uploads by FTP per month and they're pretty happy about it.

We'd love to help them getting rid of the submission, too, but that's not in our scope.

We do however now have a keywording tool, see here: http://www.microstockgroup.com/microstock-services/yet-another-keyword-(research)-tool/