One of those solutions is to pay someone to keywor my images. Method will be to send someone small images and they will keyword it and send back. Don't know how much is real price  for this job and have anyone some experience about this.
I using microsoft photo info  for adding KW's to images, stockphotomaster for generating. Also, here is one tip. Search fotolia database for same subject, order by downloads and copy some of relevant KW's to my images. After all that import generated KW's from Microsoft Word  to iStock ImageManager for removing duplicate KW's

I had exactly the same problem a while ago: a fast 1-click workflow for tagging, included the sorting in order of relevance (as is required on Fotolia, but which other sites will implement sooner or later). If sites ever decide to limit the number of keywords, the truncation will always leave the most important ones in front.

I wrote a script for that on http://www.flemishdreams.com/tag/index.html
(spellcheck, automatic duplicates removal, templates, 1-click sorting).

I'm training an English literature graduate here in the Philippines right now to do my tagging. Works pretty well, considering the low wage level in the Philippines. And I was considering starting an outsourced tagging service which could be quite competitive. I know of 2 companies that will tag for you (one in the UK, one in India) but they are (1) expensive and (2) not very stock-minded (more into photojournalism).

If you (or anybody else) is interested, just send me a PM on this site, or mail me on my site http://www.flemishdreams.com email. All we need is a low jpg quality thumb of 600px or so, and 30$ct would be a reasonable fee for 35-50 relevance-sorted tags. The advantage is you can copy the tags in your IPTC, so they are available for ALL sites.

I had hoped we would be offered a good alternative watermark but I didn't like the changes.  Here's an example http://www.luckyoliver.com/photo/2199673/

This one's looking very well protected to me.

Browsing through my "huge" portfolio (I deleted most because of the initial absence of a watermark) of 3 photos at SV, I noticed that the view count staid unchanged for 6 weeks (4,4,24). Not much going on?

Doing a search on "asian, man" I found (1) that my shot with those keywords doesn't turn up and (2) some real beauties that make me wonder about SV quality control.

Perfect isolation and absence of hard frontal flash shadow. Look how well the black gun stands out against the black suit:


Perfect isolation, perfect contrast, no blown-out highlights, great focus on the eyes, copyspace at the right side (his back of course):


Very sharp shot of a lady glued on a sunset. What a great idea, collect all your bloopers where the focus went wrong, and call them 'blurs'. May I suggest Gaussian blur 20px? A very noise-free image too, SS would love it. A real bargain for just 25$!


No further comments....

The search function is also defective. What the heck is going on with their tag separators? Looking for "soldier, man, jungle" or "soldier man jungle" or "soldier,man,jungle" gives me:
"You searched for: soldier, man, jungle - No images found."
"You searched for: soldier man jungle - No images found."
"You searched for: soldier,man,jungle - 36 images found."

One of them is this (where is the soldier, man, jungle? It's an underwater shot):


And of course, my shot with these tags (below) isn't included:
"elated,  laptop,  male,  military,  shirtless,  computer,  people,  tropical,  wireless,  young,  young man,  victorious,  victory,  reaching,  screen,  dress,  shout,  shouting,  sitting,  skin,  slim,  soldier,  stud,  success,  tanned,  teeth,  terrorism,  terrorist,  triumph,  triumphant,  muscular,  necklace,  notebook,  nude,  PC,  man,  manly,  masculine,  elation,  exotic,  expression,  fatigues,  guerrilla,  happy,  joy,  jungle,  keyboard,  arms,  army,  Asian,  beach,  camouflage,  cheer,  cheering,  chest,  communication"

(link to photo: http://www.snapvillage.com/PictureDetail.aspx?vcb6uh=NURJwh2QzWoouLkxOmVxnDLM%2beKAsktd7I%2buPl%2bcQ8%2fr4GZpafSnknfIVohYJzmK)

Those with lots of downloads get more downloads. Hope this helps.

It did. A lot. The Matthew effect is built into the search engine and the site setup then. That's pretty  cool. I got 11$ till now on LO (projected payout 2016), and about 10x as much on Featurepics. Sure, I probably shoot crap, but I just don't understand why ShutterStock makes me as much in 3 days as LO in a year. Maybe because I upload 10MP to LO and just 6MP to SS?

The watermark on light shots is still defective. The all-mighty business-guru declared solemnly that watermarks don't matter because Dan Heller told so. Pretty cool too. I just miss the meat. Where is the meat? I won't pay for a sideshow just as I won't pay on Photoshelter. Sales on LO would skyrocket in March 2007 after a breath-taking ad campaign. Didn't see anything though.

Well, the big guys might enjoy a lot of EL's and many payouts, and so be it. Good for them and may the upload spirit always be with them. More Yuri, Andresr, Phildate, Deal on LO then. I'm just a crap amateur in the long tail and I rather offer my stuff for free on the *real* Flickr. It will save me the time to reduce noise on 10MP shots, Flickr is happy with 1MP, and SS with 6MP.

Update: I'm about to cancel my LO account. I keep the email on hold till tomorrow. Anybody has any good argument to stay on LO?

I don't blame you, that's the main reason I am staying with them.

The keyword suggester is obviously not made by CanStockPhoto but some Open Source or freeware thesaurus, like I added one (for spellcheck) to my tagging program. Does anyone on here knows what thesaurus it is? I would Google for it myself, but I'm on a feeble dial-up modem from the stone age in the Mindanao jungle now ;-)

I think their site is really one of the most attractive.  They have kept is clean and simple, and almost 'fun' to click around.

LO is fun, very well done and friendly reviewers. The sideshow? I wouldn't know since this text keeps popping up that I need 83 more sales to get there. LO would be a big blow for my feeble ego and chase me back to Flickr, but then... there is SS, and they sell. So I keep telling myself that it's not all crap what I shoot ;-)

SS first. A couple of hours after uploading, they sell already, and new shots keep your portfolio going, unlike other sites.
Then to all sites that have FTP, all at the same time - takes about an hour to 7 sites - but it runs in the background with little overhead.
Finally there is iStock, which has no FTP and a very crap slow Java uploader (on my outdated PC which is connected to the Net). It just takes too much time to upload there so I usually forget iStock.
Finally I upload the 52MP shots to Alamy.

I just had 40 accepted by QC, but to my horror I see they don't import IPTC metadata. R u supposed to copy/paste all that info by hand?

At the moment I'm back in the Philippines till the end of the year. I had some talks with local designers here, and I always got the same answer. We download freebies and watermarked thumbs as much as we can, and we clone the copyright out.

The Philippine government, just like many other surrounding governments (Indonesia, Malaisia, China) doesn't care at all about copyright issues. The markets and shops are full with functioning goodies like Photoshop CS3 - extended edition, Windows XP pro, 64, Vista, corporate, - Office 2007 corporate - recent movies, TV-series, all below 1$/DVD. I was looking for a legal MS-Win version for my new desktop here in Mindanao, and they frowned at me since it was 100$, and they had to order it especially in Manila, 1000km North.

Try to sue them. I wish you good luck, since you will be caught up in a totally corrupt system that will send you bills for fees, but will never deliver.

A market, sure. But a market that can't nor won't pay. It's difficult to compete with free.
The situation in Japan might be more normal. Forget the rest of (South)-East Asia.

Upload (FTP) simple and fast: no categories. Submit all images with just one mouseclick. Reviews superfast. The only factor slowing down the submit process is that you have to bring up each shot individually to attach a MRF: no bulk attach of MRF's. Site very well programmed and stable. If 1 programmer can get that kind of performance on a beginning site, I wonder where Snapvillage hires its programmers (Microsoft?).

Although I have a shot on the general landing page (there is only one), no DLs yet. With 40K shots (5000 from Andresr) that are also probably on older established sites with 10-50 times GK's number of images, it will be a very hard job for Richard to get by, imho.

Shutterstock is my wife. LuckyOliver is my mistress. LO is a great looking site, with very helpful reviewers, based on newspeak (sticky words, carnies, odditorium - keywords, reviewers, forum) and a warm feeling. For me, it doesn't make any money, but it's fun.

SS is fun too, and it makes money. I will have a 3-digit earning on SS in September. On LO, I will have a projected payout in 2016. That's the bottomline.

IMHO, the worst mistake Bryan makes is wanting to make a second Flickr from LO, and let comments play into the search results. I'm not on a pro microstock site to get hugs and comments, but to get $$. For the social things, there is Flickr. And it works quite well for that, combined with LinkedIn.

So it seems that multiple words in the search are treated with the conditional "or".

I found out the same. They don't "AND". Searches are pretty useless now. The flash programming also blocks my (slow) PC, so I just avoid the site for now.

Sorry for our 'crap' attitude.    And, bad vibes too...

Well, that's subjective ;-)
The bad vibes were a year ago. A year is a century in stock. We all got better too. Im currently at Alamy, wouldn't have dared to apply there a year ago. Most still here got better. We upgraded cams, techniques, and concept. Rejections are part of life, as long as they are motivated well.
Many pro photgs flow into microstock. New ones too like my countryfellow Perrush who is far above my level, and made it right from the start into the Dreamstime charts. Things change... microstock changes... it's a rat race.

For the evaluation of a portfolio 500+, it would be better to send in a CD and not to lose bandwidth. Its also easier to review. Put the approved ones in queue and we can just categorize at our ease. Sendin a CD is more time efficient than upload 500 shots.