Hi daniel,

I Export the Images, drop them into Folders which names are Serial numbers and write the names of the agencies into Textfiles of the same name. I don't track which image is where accepted. This would possibly a nice feature but i don't know why exactly i would need it.
The portfolio is online and i can see which images are in which port anytime i want to.
Nice would be something to keep track of the sales of an image across all agencies.

Regards, Alex

Anyways, back on subject. It works pretty well, but I kinda want to extend the thing. So I'm trying to get some feedback here to how you guys use lightroom (if any of you does) to keep track of where your photos are uploaded.

It's a waste of time. I upload by batches of 10 to all sites with Filezilla (to IS with Deepmeta) then forget. The only rejects I watch are on SS, DT, and IS. Till now, I don't even know what was rejected on FT or 123RF since their reject reasons are stereotypes without any value and I don't know where to find it on their site. Anyways, what can you do? Resubmit is not worth the time, since IS for instance will reject it again for another reason. Often, IS will attach a problematic image area and that can be very instructive.

This ispending/isrejected/isaccepted thing is typical for beginners. The people/persons that use iSyndica and Prostockmaster typically. The sales are the bottomline. Just shoot, edit and upload. I removed Lightpro from my disk since it's an amateur tool: it can't clone, it can't reduce noise and it does things with your image beyond control, things you can do better (and controlled) with Photoshop.

I use to try to keep them separated, but then that gets a bit time consuming so now I have three folders, one is upload pending, meaning they haven't been uploaded yet, one for upload, meaning they haven't been uploaded yet, and one for accepted files. I upload to all the sites through filezilla and then go and edit them. Usually if only one of the files makes it on one site and not the rest...it still goes under accepted because I very rarely resubmit. I find that simple approach easier to do than trying to separate them all.

I use the good old Excel approach: Columns for the agencies and rows for each single image. Yellow colour in the cell means uploaded, green approved and red rejected. That way I can easily count acceptance ration of each image and also of each agency which is important information for me since I am rather new.

That's what I did for the first year and then I got bored. Rejects don't matter because one place takes something, another refuses. The one refused at one site, gets accepted on another. Made me crazy. I don't bother re-submitting because I agree in just about every instance. I did correct one for IS and sent it back, got accepted. Has never sold.

I use the folder system mentioned above. One set for each agency because I have different keywords for SS Editorial than IS and the rest. Once they go to SS with the special keywords, they are deleted, I keep the general "any agency" versions backed up. That would be New Micro <month>, a folder for each agency under that "Upload" for that days uploads, when they are sent, splash... into the pool.

Someone starting can get good feedback by tracking rejections and accepted and learn what the agencies want.

Basically at this point I only pay attention to Sales. The agencies do that for me. Mark me lazy, but all the tracking doesn't do much but make work.

I used a spreadsheet in the past - now I simply don't keep track as it's too time consuming: I upload the same folder to all agencies and then move the folder to an archive location

I'm new to having more than one agency, (previously I had just one, so it was easy ; )  but here's what I've set up for the time being.

I have a folder for each agency, and one additional folder called "to submit". In the "to submit" I keep my master high res edited file, along with a low res thumbnail copy. After I submit, I copy the thumbnail version to the folder of the agency I've submitted to. After it's accepted, I move the thumbnail into that agency's "accepted" subfolder.

So far so good, although I realize that the thumbnails take up more memory than file numbers on a spreadsheet would. I've used spreadsheets in the past and honestly I find them too tedious to maintain long term (my bad, but I have to figure out what works for me). I love the visual aspect of a thumbnail. I'm anticipating that I will set a size limit to the "accepted" folders and archive to disks.  We'll see...

do you mean Lightroom is for amateurs? Sounds like you where using it as a photoshop replacement, something its not (and where never meant to be)

Not at all. I know a group of professional photographers that use it all the time. But they are not stockers: events, glamor, weddings, assignments. Last year I was a few days at a GTG/shoot days and I saw them working with Lightroom. It is fast and gives good results probably for prints. But when I looked at some result images (pumped up for under-exposure) in Photoshop, it was ridden with noise. It would never get accepted anywhere on microstock. The remark of them was that a good photo "needs some noise". I just concluded for myself that Lightroom might be a great tool for a fast work flow for event photographers, but it does too many things out-of-control for microstock. Of course I might be totally wrong!

For the same reason I don't like to rely on third-party software/databases for uploading/tracking. What if the database gets corrupt, the third party stops operation or fails on solving bugs? You're helpless.

What I use is a simple Excel spreadsheet: batch numbers in the rows, agents in the columns, upload date in the cells. Every batch is 10 images. The only thing that matters is whether it's uploaded or not. I don't care for rejections, since how would that benefit me? I certainly won't reprocess since that time can better be used to make new shots.