New to stock, got accepted to some agencies and still have a tiny portfolio. I went the presumably tedious way of using all the different web uploaders and manually re-tagging all the pictures, which I imagine is a very classic newbie thing to do.

I want to be as efficient as possible going forward, so I would be very appreciative of any advice of workflow from more experienced users.

Say I have a batch of 20 new images. Can you add IPTC data in Lightroom for instance and then just upload to each of the site's FTP accounts with your user log in? Or are there more steps involved?

Thanks in advance

Here's what I do, I use Xpiks (you can find a thread about here, I think the developer himself is running it) to keyword and then upload to as much agencies as it supports, to the rest which aren't supported I upload manually.

Ok, so keywording in Lightroom and then uploading through Xpiks. I'll give that a test run, thank you all for your feedback!

Seems like I have to investigate the details for each site as well, like which ones require categories and do some manual work there.

If there are other tips as far as workflow / efficiency goes that took you a while to learn or you wish you knew from the get-go, I welcome those tips!

Check out dropstock.io too (full disclosure: built by myself). After setting up the FTP credentials for all agencies you want to use, you just have to sync your files with your dropbox account and we'll pick them up from there and make sure they are uploaded. Saves you a lot of time and bandwidth (which can be huge if you're traveling, pay by data usage or have a crappy internet connection).

Oh, and it's free while in beta

Yes, keyword, caption, etc in Lightroom, then upload. If your FTP software has an automated feature, (mine does, I use FTP voyager) it can run when your computer is idle.

And, yes, every site is different. Some will take a few seconds regardless of how many you upload, and some will take a few seconds per image.

Hello there,

As usually I need retouch the photos in lightroom -> use keyword tool (Yuri's, shutterstock website) -> upload photos to each stock.

If I improve the process using Xpiks / Stock submitter, it still need to copy keywords back to lightroom (original photos).

I found the Keyword Master plugin for Lr. is anyone use this plugin?

And actually I have a friend to help me write keywords. We spend a lot of time to do duplicate works.

Quote from: Zalee on December 17, 2016, 17:16

I was putting keywords, descriptions etc. in Xpiks but if you keep that file for future use you have extra side files to store as well so now all keywords, titles and descriptions are done in Lightroom. Then I upload to most through Xpiks. I wasted so much time when I started by not putting that information on in Lightroom.

Are you sure? Tags are right there in the original files, the extra files, as I understood and read in the Xpiks thread, are just some internal Xpiks backups, not really needed. Am I missing something?

If you need to go back and edit the pic, missed a dust spot or want to use a different size file the title and description are not in Lightroom for you to export. So it's just easier to fill all fields in LR and you're right for any future work on the file. When pulling into Xpiks it just uses the information that's already on the file.