More to the point... how much do YOU need to live full time?

I know one woman here in town that lives quite comfortably on $800/mo.  If that were me, then I would say I am just a bit shy of being able to go "full time" for an income.

Personally, $10K/mo is more my style.  And no, stock sales are no more than pocket change and the fun of seeing who liked my stuff enough each day to actually put money on it (as opposed to Facebook 'likes'...).

As it happens though, I am retired.  I travel a lot (8 countries on a 6-month trip already this year), and write a travel/photo blog ( www.mindstormphoto.com ).  That is where most of my focus goes.  After the blog is published, I look to see what else might sell, and upload that too.  I am fortunate enough that I saved and invested heavily when working, so now can do this and no longer have to worry about money. As they say, YMMV...

And, FWIW, I do not monetize my blog in any way, and have no interest in doing so.  I started writing it for myself, just to help me remember and relive these trips we take. Then "family and friends" started reading it. Now it has roughly 2000 readers (according to Google Analytics).  In other words, another little ego boost, but with no cash attached.

Ok - this is what I've done so far

Sounds like an excellent move!  Hopefully this will reduce the amount of spam posted here, which is downright ridiculous in spurts.

Unfortunately, on my own blog, I had to simply turn off comments. I was getting 10 spam posts for every valid one.

Well, "inexpensive" is relative to the buyer, but...

I would consider a 6TB a waste of money and something that I would need to replace way too soon. The smallest I use currently are 12TB drives.  My preferred is G-Tech --

    https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1360172-REG/g_technology_0g05383_g_drive_pro_12tb_7200_2x.html

For my serious work, I use a 96TB drive though.  These 12TB drives are on my wife's laptop, one for external storage and a second one for TimeMachine.  (I haven't decided what to do yet when that TM is no longer large enough -- ran out of space on a 8TB TM last month...)

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...

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?

First, yes, I keep up. Personally I have found that if I don't "keep up," I give up and never really go back and do those earlier trips. Now, mind you, "keep ups" may mean I am 6 months and 7 countries behind, but I try to keep  up in relative terms!   (Common for me to do 8 countries over 6 months in a single year)

I usually travel to new countries each year. I rarely visit the same country more than once (a very few countries 2 or 3 times, usually decades between visits).  Personal choice, I want to see what is new, and I find going back is often a disillusionment of my rose-colored glasses of past travels.  As such, any "keyword memory" past this year is probably not useful. YMMV...

not sure where I said "10 sec for 100 images." Too much discussion of too many scenarios going on here for me to remember that exact phrase.  I easily do that (and faster) when doing "custom agency keywords" under MS+.  For initial keyword, though, I think I said (at least meant...) 10 seconds per image for 100 images.  Not sure if I misses the "per image" or if you missed reading it, but that is definitely what I meant. Yes, I spend about 10 seconds per image for a rational number of image in a session (and yes, I tend to stop at roughly 100 per session, because my brain becomes fried and my work quality reduces).

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...

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

Yes.  I will usually have 2 or 3 related clips for a scene.  I never use the exact same title for more than one image, but I will use a similar title, with a word or two changed.  Also, for editorial, I will often have 20 to 50 from the same city being processed together. Thus, the "city, state, country - date" info is the same on all those.

I also use "copy clip" on a Mac. That keeps my last 20 clipboard items in a list that I can easily retrieve. I find that helps speed things along, as I put key phrases (or editorial leads) in the list, then recall them quickly for reuse as needed.

More specifically I was wondering if there was any advantage to submitting longer clips. I realize that short clips (under 5 seconds) have very limited use. I seem to sell mostly between 10 and 25 second clips, but I wasn't sure what other people's experience was.

The owner of BlackBox, and a few of his most experienced people, have been doing stock video for more than a decade. Their experience is that the prime length is 10 to 15 seconds.  I tend to push that to 20 sec, so the buyer has a bit of flexibility.

They state that if your clip is longer, you are best to break it into 2 (or more) clips and post each separately.

When I look at videos in which I know (or suspect) that stock footage is used, I keep a mental stopwatch on the likely stock clips.  Yep, it is very rare for one to last 10 seconds.  3 to 5 seems far more common for those kinds of clips.  BB did point out one specific video that was made entirely with stock clips last year.  When I watched it, I never saw a scene go longer than 5 seconds.

BTW, I am not advocating BlackBox. Merely noting that the owner does appear to be an experienced and successful stock video producer, and passing along things he has said, and which seem to make sense to me (after watching published videos more closely).

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).

I simply cannot understand why people ask for the closure of this discussion when they can simply ignore it! Those willing to participate should be able to do it.

HOW can I drop this "off topic" section from the RSS feed. I see no way to do so. I either get ALL Microstock messages, or none.

And there is plenty of other places to troll political trash. No need whatsoever to pollute yet another space.

If you only upload to iStock, I am not sure why you are wasting your time at all?  That is -- by a very wide margin -- one of my smallest sales agencies.  I stopped uploading anything to them about a year ago.  They were my first agency and pretty good a decade ago.  Now they sell for peanuts, when they sell at all.  When the bulk of my sales are under 10 cents, it is time to dump the agency entirely.... which I did...

As for imstocker not working the way you ask, give it a fair try.  Once you get used to it (took me less than an hour), it is VERY fast to keyword.  I spend maybe 30 sec per photo to generate 40-50 high quality keywords.  I have a hard time imaging any system that would be any faster...

You can also keep backup 2T or 3T hard drives, old and new, both at home and in a bank safety box.

That was an approach I used in the 80's.  Every month I would go to the bank and swap out disks (actually DVDs in those days).

And, of course, the inevitable happened.  After doing this for years, I got complacent.  I skipped a month.  Then two. Then disaster struck and my main disk died.  Oops, my data was close to 3 months old, and everything done in those preceding 3 months was lost forever.

In my case, I was a software developer and that meant that 3 months worth of coding was lost.  By the nature of coding (once you have done correctly once, the next time is much faster), it "only" took me a month (of non-billable time, since I couldn't very well charge my clients for my own stupidity) to recover and get back to where I had been before the disaster.

No system that relies on your taking explicit difficult action (as in, more than pushing a button right in front of you) is a decent protection for your data.

In my current case, such a mechanism would not be feasible anyway. My main RAID is 80TB, and my backup drive is 50TB (which is rapidly becoming a problem...).  There ain't no safe deposit box big enough to put a 80TB drive, let alone two (one backup is NEVER safe), even if I did want to buy more $8,000 drives...

An alternative method would to install team viewer on your home machine, then when your on the road, send files home with your travel laptop via team viewer.

Or use Dropbox

Or pay for a hosting service and upload via ftp

Or use backblaze backup

I have all of the above.

You must not shoot much and/or only travel to places with very fast internet.  There is no way in the world traveling internet could ever keep up with my media.  And it is pretty common for me to be in places for a week or two with little or not internet at all.

A couple months ago I was in Iran for two weeks. Couldn't reach Backblaze or my own web site at all.  Last year I spent a month in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan.  Internet was dial-up speeds.

Personally I always travel with two 4TB USB drives.  One is backed up to every night. The other is backed up at the end of every week or when changing countries.  The laptop itself has a 4TB SSD, which is the primary location.  Thus, I always have 2 copies, and my third copy is never more than one week old.  The computer and each of the disks are all kept in different suitcases, so if one is stolen, I always have the other.