If you're new to this, you'll get better and faster at editing the photos and handling metadata over time.

10 similars is going to get you a lot of rejections - not all agencies are equally strict, but you want to make selections based on usefulness (which equates to salability) not on how fast you can process the files.

Good images will sell for years, so the time to get it online isn't really an issue except for those image spam portfolios on SS, and there is no reason to try and be like them

The workflow we use is this:

1) Import and organize all images in Lightroom.  Takes me maybe 5 min for 1000 photos.  LR takes longer, but I am off doing other stuff while it is importing.

2) My wife goes through that 1000 and chooses roughly the best 10%. She also crops those during the pass, and typically marks 30% of so as 'rejected.'  After having been through this cycle 100+ times, I now just accept her reject states and "delete all rejected photos, remove from disk" without reviewing.  Her time is usually an hour or two for those 1000 images.

3) I "delete all rejected" (noted above). I then go through all 100 selected images and edit them to be suitable for blog and stock use.  My time for 100 images is maybe 10 minutes.  (I have created LR presets of my own that fit the various types of photos I create -- many photos are single-click edits. Maybe 20% require slight tweaking for shadows, noise, whatever).

4) <not related to stock> I select the images for my blog, gather into "story blocks," write the text for the story, etc.

5) I title/desc all 100 images. 15 min.

6) I keyword all 100 images.  15-20 min (I use ImStocker, which makes it very fast).

7) I upload all 100 images using FTP program to MicroStock Plus.  My time about 1 min.  (takes longer to upload, but I am doing other things while it does so)

In MicroStock Plus, select all agencies and all images, and press "submit".  My time about 1 min.

So, I spend about an hour to edit / keyword / upload / submit 100 images.  Add another hour to get from 1000 initially shot images to the 100 that will be sent to stock.

Note that when we are traveling, this is done almost every single day.  We just returned last week from 6 months covering 8 countries. Shot roughly 75,000 photos. After deleting rejects, came back with 43,823 images and clips.  I still have a backlog of the sending to agencies, because I try to space things out (will probably not have any more for the rest of 2019), but all the work up through editing and titling is done on the photos.  Roughly 800 raw video clips still waiting to be processed (those I hold until home).

Hi Mindstorm, do you fancy sharing a link to your blog? We have been travelling for 4+ years now and very interested to see what you have been up to.

Now I know you are offering a guide, but 15 minutes to title 100 photos, seems very quick, 9 seconds per photo. Going to guess that you do batch titling and some minor adjustments to differentiate certain photos

Thanks

Hi Mindstorm, do you fancy sharing a link to your blog? We have been travelling for 4+ years now and very interested to see what you have been up to.

www.MindStormPhoto.com

I send out a brief email newsletter once a month, in which I summarize what posts were made the prior month.  If you would like to receive that, send me your email address requesting it to -- burt (at) mindstorm-inc (dot) com

The workflow we use is this:

1) Import and organize all images in Lightroom.  Takes me maybe 5 min for 1000 photos.  LR takes longer, but I am off doing other stuff while it is importing.

2) My wife goes through that 1000 and chooses roughly the best 10%. She also crops those during the pass, and typically marks 30% of so as 'rejected.'  After having been through this cycle 100+ times, I now just accept her reject states and "delete all rejected photos, remove from disk" without reviewing.  Her time is usually an hour or two for those 1000 images.

3) I "delete all rejected" (noted above). I then go through all 100 selected images and edit them to be suitable for blog and stock use.  My time for 100 images is maybe 10 minutes.  (I have created LR presets of my own that fit the various types of photos I create -- many photos are single-click edits. Maybe 20% require slight tweaking for shadows, noise, whatever).

4) <not related to stock> I select the images for my blog, gather into "story blocks," write the text for the story, etc.

5) I title/desc all 100 images. 15 min.

6) I keyword all 100 images.  15-20 min (I use ImStocker, which makes it very fast).

7) I upload all 100 images using FTP program to MicroStock Plus.  My time about 1 min.  (takes longer to upload, but I am doing other things while it does so)

In MicroStock Plus, select all agencies and all images, and press "submit".  My time about 1 min.

So, I spend about an hour to edit / keyword / upload / submit 100 images.  Add another hour to get from 1000 initially shot images to the 100 that will be sent to stock.

Note that when we are traveling, this is done almost every single day.  We just returned last week from 6 months covering 8 countries. Shot roughly 75,000 photos. After deleting rejects, came back with 43,823 images and clips.  I still have a backlog of the sending to agencies, because I try to space things out (will probably not have any more for the rest of 2019), but all the work up through editing and titling is done on the photos.  Roughly 800 raw video clips still waiting to be processed (those I hold until home).

impressive!!!!  I have a pretty organised workflow also, that I do all by myself, so can I also share the lament of us females... "I wish I had a wife"!!!!!!    that is an insane amount of work. i've been adding 2K images/vids per year and thinking that was good. clearly need to up my game.
but back to topic, i think it takes about 30secs per image to do tagging. although if you have similars maybe you can speed that up. a set of 10 similars might only take 1 min to keyword, once you are good at it. but don't forget some sites have their annoying peculiarities, like Alamy wanting starred kw, and i can never get the title to UL. Adobe having ordered kw. Getty just refusing words it doesn't like. SS too, deciding that "colour" isn't a word, despite suggesting it. Fun. that's part of the job. But, you can do it whilst watching a movie so it's not all bad.

impressive!!!!  I have a pretty organised workflow also, that I do all by myself, so can I also share the lament of us females... "I wish I had a wife"!!!!!!    that is an insane amount of work. i've been adding 2K images/vids per year and thinking that was good. clearly need to up my game.
but back to topic, i think it takes about 30secs per image to do tagging. although if you have similars maybe you can speed that up. a set of 10 similars might only take 1 min to keyword, once you are good at it. but don't forget some sites have their annoying peculiarities, like Alamy wanting starred kw, and i can never get the title to UL. Adobe having ordered kw. Getty just refusing words it doesn't like. SS too,   deciding that "colour" isn't a word, despite suggesting it. Fun. that' part of the job. But, you can do it whilst watching a movie so it's not all bad.

I did it myself until about two years ago. We were in Uzbekistan and another couple talked about how they share the task of editing.  They finally shamed my wife into helping out.  I will forever love that couple!   (actually, it was someone we had traveled with before and since, and I do actually like them both).

For the others, src*w them...  I use Microstock Plus to submit all my work these days (started just this past Feb, but now wonder how I ever did this without them -- certainly not as much or as well).  I upload once.  All agencies get the same... EXCEPT that MS+ also supports "agency specific metadata," so for video I add 3 more fields for ClipCanvas as an example.  Takes only 10 seconds to handle 100 images (or as many as you choose to group). Adds such things as "shot on a tripod vs handheld" or "lighting is daylight vs artificial."  Very easy to select large groups and just set them all at once.

I dropped iStock/Getty last year. Analyzing past sales, I got fed up with the large number of 1 cent sales.  Average below 10 cents.  I didn't spend the effort to delete old images, but they have not gotten any new material from me for the past year.

Adobe gets my normal Lightroom keywords. No ordering added. They want them? Tough luck.  They still have become my highest revenue producer in the last year (not highest number of downloads by any stretch, but they pay much more per DL than SS). 

I have never done anything extra for Alamy.  They have accepted 100% of everything I have given them since the first month (when I did learn a couple of mistakes I was making that they pointed out).  They get nothing past that from me.  Of course, they are not a huge revenue source either, so maybe i am losing some $ by not going past the initial KW...?

IOW, part of my ability to do it fast is (1) I use the tools available to best of my ability, and (2) I ignore the vagaries that various agencies want.  If they start paying better, I would stand up and give them attention. At current pay rate, they get what everyone else gets. No more...

Quote from: cascoly on August 05, 2019, 11:51

I use an excel sheet with 4 fields for description, and one for tags, so it's easy to copy, eg, city,country, or entire desc or tags, then quickly edit.   allows quick search over thousands of entries over many years; eg street fairs, or repeat visits to national parks or cities

I tried that once.  First, I found that I almost never went back more than a dozen clipboard sets, and I can program CopyClip to do as many back as I wish (I have it set to keep 80 and display the last 20).

Further back than that, and I have too many other changes or have simply forgotten -- it has fallen out of my personal memory buffer...

Also, for anything more than a couple weeks back, I have probably refined what I will say on a certain situation.  This is a fair, and I have done them in the past?  Well...  I will group the processing of this fair together, so short-memory-buffer is ideal.  I did this same fair last year?  I probably describe things better... or at least different... now.  If I did use the exact same keywords, then I am just having this year's fair competing directly with last year, since both would show the same on any given search.

Once I realized the above (and discovered CopyClip), I dropped the old SS approach...

that works if you can keep up -- I need the older captions as I dont always finish one trip's images before taking another trip, so I have thousands of images waiting to be captioned that were taken several years ago. ( which is also why I try to enter date & image number for beginning & end of a particular shoot - sometimes just the town, often the several different churches or ruins we visited)

when you said 10 sec for 100 images - is that selecting the group and creating/pasting caption and keywords?

Think I may have introduced the '9 seconds per image' comment...

Mindstorm, Had a quick look at your web site, great photos, lots and lots of travel. Now the one country that you missing is my home town of New Zealand (Middle Earth), got to add NZ to your bucket list. Fantastic scenery, amazing people, unique wildlife, vineyards to die for and a warm generous welcome for all visitors (unless you are the England cricket team).. get down there.

Mindstorm, Had a quick look at your web site, great photos, lots and lots of travel. Now the one country that you missing is my home town of New Zealand (Middle Earth), got to add NZ to your bucket list. Fantastic scenery, amazing people, unique wildlife, vineyards to die for and a warm generous welcome for all visitors (unless you are the England cricket team).. get down there.

Thanks for the compliment.

As it happens, New Zealand is getting Real High on our list. We almost set it up for next year, but then Bali / Borneo caught our eye. We now expect to travel with David Metcalf there next year.  We overdid it this year, and will slow down a bit next year, so will probably just spend a couple months in that part of the world.  We already have a commitment for Myanmar (our second trip) in December 2020, and need to spend a couple weeks in California (where we lived prior to moving to Ecuador), so I think that will max out our travel for next year.

New Zealand is currently top choice for our 2021 plans though...