Thanks

If you get no results that means your search parameters don't match anything in the database of currently ~ 36 million photos, vectors and videos. Can happen with some niches or typos of course

I'm a bit biased since I built both, but for keywording have a look at https://www.keyword.io/tool/stock-photo-research and for uploading at https://dropstock.io and let me know what you think

@steheap
Thanks for mentioning https://www.keyword.io/tool/stock-photo-research, please note that the order is based on the likelihood of keywords being relevant for your query, not the sales!

In consequence, the top keywords are most likely the most generic ones, so you might want to double-check before pasting them

OK, didn't see that concern, my bad.

Those APIs only expose the amount of sales/downloads but there are no details about what kind of license, resolution, .... let alone amount of money earned.

That's not a matter of lax security but agencies putting in the effort of making this data available for third parties to sell more through resellers and integrations into big publishers software solutions. So it's in the interest of the artists, too.

Furthermore you can't see aggregated statistics per artist (you can just sum up sales on their assets you know about) or track over time (unless you want to do the delta between intervals). It's interesting to see the spread between artists' portfolios, some having a few dozen pictures, others have tens of thousands.
Apart from curiosity and vanity, I don't really see a point publishing such numbers, so I wont.

Sorry for the confusion, hope this helped clarifying

Thanks, glad to see the tool is useful to some! No worries, I don't feel hammered in the ground just yet

I understand some people are wary about free stuff. I built it because it's fun, hopefully useful and a good way to promote another (free) service I built - dropstock.io - which maybe one day might make me a bit of money on the side. So much about ulterior motives.

If the tool is useful for you that's great. If it's not, I appreciate constructive feedback. If you feel you don't get any value out of the tool without knowing exactly which agencies data is used, that's too bad...

It's a mix of major and minor agencies. Feel free to read through their tech documentation yourself, it's all openly available, but please understand that I won't give any details to make it easier for the competition to copy the tool

Several do. They are interested in making sales through resellers, so they give them quite a lot of data. On some you can even see the artist names...

[Edited]: To be fair, alamy.com is not part of the database, not sure if they do provide such numbers.

Some agencies do publish those numbers in their APIs, although you may not see those on their websites.

First of all a big disclaimer: I am not selling photos myself so all I say is from looking at statistics and educated guesses.

I totally agree that quality > quantity and to be very clear: Keywording tools should be used to find more _relevant_ keywords, not just max out the amount of allowed keywords.

That doesn't mean, that you shouldn't add very *generic* keywords, too, though.

For the fun of it I just looked for the most frequent keywords in the database, see end of post.

12.5% of images have the keyword "background". Further analysis shows, that 79.566% of assets with that keyword have 0 sales while 80.076% of ALL assets have 0 sales. Now I don't want to do the math to test if that's scientifically significant, but I would make the case that generic keywords don't hurt your sales. Other top keywords rank around 79.5 - 80.5, too.

Which makes sense to me intuitively - you will never rank for "background" or if your CTR would be crap, but your average buyer won't search just for "background" but for "dense forest background" - where your picture "dense forest" picture will get its chance once you add the generic "background" keyword.

(Another shameless pluck: check out http://www.keyword.io/tool/fotolia-longtail-finder to get ideas of actual search phrases based on fotolias's autosuggest. It's far from being as good as google's though, so you might want to have a look at that, too...)


Here's some raw data of the 100 most frequent keywords:

[
          {
            "key": "background",
            "doc_count": 4591388
          },
          {
            "key": "white",
            "doc_count": 3987768
          },
          {
            "key": "nature",
            "doc_count": 2484515
          },
          {
            "key": "isolated",
            "doc_count": 2435124
          },
          {
            "key": "beautiful",
            "doc_count": 2413848
          },
          {
            "key": "people",
            "doc_count": 2229395
          },
          {
            "key": "design",
            "doc_count": 2127786
          },
          {
            "key": "illustration",
            "doc_count": 1904740
          },
          {
            "key": "blue",
            "doc_count": 1888078
          },
          {
            "key": "green",
            "doc_count": 1886371
          },
          {
            "key": "young",
            "doc_count": 1874181
          },
          {
            "key": "woman",
            "doc_count": 1753721
          },
          {
            "key": "red",
            "doc_count": 1703703
          },
          {
            "key": "person",
            "doc_count": 1669872
          },
          {
            "key": "female",
            "doc_count": 1655572
          },
          {
            "key": "summer",
            "doc_count": 1603761
          },
          {
            "key": "beauty",
            "doc_count": 1568581
          },
          {
            "key": "travel",
            "doc_count": 1563713
          },
          {
            "key": "color",
            "doc_count": 1561565
          },
          {
            "key": "business",
            "doc_count": 1536681
          },
          {
            "key": "on",
            "doc_count": 1534946
          },
          {
            "key": "food",
            "doc_count": 1525440
          },
          {
            "key": "symbol",
            "doc_count": 1462259
          },
          {
            "key": "vector",
            "doc_count": 1444441
          },
          {
            "key": "happy",
            "doc_count": 1442463
          },
          {
            "key": "concept",
            "doc_count": 1404698
          },
          {
            "key": "black",
            "doc_count": 1355581
          },
          {
            "key": "old",
            "doc_count": 1328315
          },
          {
            "key": "girl",
            "doc_count": 1328268
          },
          {
            "key": "of",
            "doc_count": 1319744
          },
          {
            "key": "sky",
            "doc_count": 1319360
          },
          {
            "key": "closeup",
            "doc_count": 1314140
          },
          {
            "key": "caucasian",
            "doc_count": 1306044
          },
          {
            "key": "in",
            "doc_count": 1288970
          },
          {
            "key": "healthy",
            "doc_count": 1281133
          },
          {
            "key": "art",
            "doc_count": 1268722
          },
          {
            "key": "man",
            "doc_count": 1267496
          },
          {
            "key": "natural",
            "doc_count": 1241623
          },
          {
            "key": "abstract",
            "doc_count": 1221299
          },
          {
            "key": "portrait",
            "doc_count": 1202016
          },
          {
            "key": "adult",
            "doc_count": 1143252
          },
          {
            "key": "fresh",
            "doc_count": 1126741
          },
          {
            "key": "water",
            "doc_count": 1102621
          },
          {
            "key": "with",
            "doc_count": 1089499
          },
          {
            "key": "style",
            "doc_count": 1071221
          },
          {
            "key": "architecture",
            "doc_count": 1053418
          },
          {
            "key": "decoration",
            "doc_count": 1051273
          },
          {
            "key": "yellow",
            "doc_count": 1034675
          },
          {
            "key": "male",
            "doc_count": 1029181
          },
          {
            "key": "landscape",
            "doc_count": 1020224
          },
          {
            "key": "sign",
            "doc_count": 1015971
          },
          {
            "key": "modern",
            "doc_count": 1014797
          },
          {
            "key": "outdoor",
            "doc_count": 997496
          },
          {
            "key": "vintage",
            "doc_count": 993881
          },
          {
            "key": "pattern",
            "doc_count": 987256
          },
          {
            "key": "cute",
            "doc_count": 981877
          },
          {
            "key": "lifestyle",
            "doc_count": 980955
          },
          {
            "key": "holiday",
            "doc_count": 979195
          },
          {
            "key": "and",
            "doc_count": 977286
          },
          {
            "key": "texture",
            "doc_count": 968744
          },
          {
            "key": "the",
            "doc_count": 961560
          },
          {
            "key": "colorful",
            "doc_count": 959809
          },
          {
            "key": "view",
            "doc_count": 948446
          },
          {
            "key": "light",
            "doc_count": 941141
          },
          {
            "key": "nobody",
            "doc_count": 937180
          },
          {
            "key": "fashion",
            "doc_count": 921896
          },
          {
            "key": "tourism",
            "doc_count": 888435
          },
          {
            "key": "icon",
            "doc_count": 885558
          },
          {
            "key": "outdoors",
            "doc_count": 884011
          },
          {
            "key": "brown",
            "doc_count": 880305
          },
          {
            "key": "building",
            "doc_count": 875284
          },
          {
            "key": "city",
            "doc_count": 867419
          },
          {
            "key": "graphic",
            "doc_count": 864338
          },
          {
            "key": "one",
            "doc_count": 853655
          },
          {
            "key": "bright",
            "doc_count": 840991
          },
          {
            "key": "retro",
            "doc_count": 839586
          },
          {
            "key": "attractive",
            "doc_count": 834603
          },
          {
            "key": "hand",
            "doc_count": 833679
          },
          {
            "key": "health",
            "doc_count": 830408
          },
          {
            "key": "technology",
            "doc_count": 819292
          },
          {
            "key": "day",
            "doc_count": 817106
          },
          {
            "key": "wooden",
            "doc_count": 781709
          },
          {
            "key": "object",
            "doc_count": 777029
          },
          {
            "key": "traditional",
            "doc_count": 770831
          },
          {
            "key": "smiling",
            "doc_count": 769664
          },
          {
            "key": "fun",
            "doc_count": 768681
          },
          {
            "key": "plant",
            "doc_count": 767075
          },
          {
            "key": "pretty",
            "doc_count": 760217
          },
          {
            "key": "wood",
            "doc_count": 738521
          },
          {
            "key": "face",
            "doc_count": 725763
          },
          {
            "key": "smile",
            "doc_count": 716028
          },
          {
            "key": "spring",
            "doc_count": 713376
          },
          {
            "key": "season",
            "doc_count": 703530
          },
          {
            "key": "tree",
            "doc_count": 698072
          },
          {
            "key": "sea",
            "doc_count": 686473
          },
          {
            "key": "paper",
            "doc_count": 681462
          },
          {
            "key": "europe",
            "doc_count": 680923
          },
          {
            "key": "culture",
            "doc_count": 667678
          },
          {
            "key": "animal",
            "doc_count": 665415
          },
          {
            "key": "home",
            "doc_count": 659297
          }
        ]


[Edited to put the data into a code section]

Secret of trade

But that's the data I gathered for http://www.keyword.io/tool/stock-photo-research into a big database, so it's a matter of minutes to run such queries on.

Hi,

you may want to try my free tool: http://www.keyword.io/tool/stock-photo-research which shows you views&sales stats based on keywords on 30+ million photos, videos and vector graphics across multiple agencies.

No # of searches though, sorry.

Hey,
thanks for mentioning keyword.io, I built that a while ago, happy to see it's helping!

I once made a quick test based on 30+ million stock photos in the database and there indeed was a strong correlation between the number of keywords and number of sales. In short: The more the better.

But:

1. Irrelevant keywords certainly don't help and might actually hurt by reducing your CTR
2. There might be a correlation between quality of the asset and number of keywords - more experienced and devoted artists may invest more in keywording.

So use tools like keyword.io to find keywords that you might have missed otherwise, but don't try to fill up all slots with tangential stuff

Also, make sure to optimise your title/description and use the most relevant keywords there, too. Basic search engine optimisation...

Yes, we'll have to put a (reasonable) price tag on this at some point, first we want to make sure this works absolutely flawlessly. We recently enabled video uploads and that's bringing a whole new set of challenges to the game.

Luckily, there's no need for us to rush, that's no startup but a small side project  scratching our own needs, so we prioritise on making it as reliable (and thus hands-off) as possible before we start looking into covering costs.

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

Oh btw, I recently launched this: http://www.keyword.io/tool/stock-photo-research

It extracts keywords and statistics of views and sales from 33+ million images, vectors and videos from multiple agencies, so this might be useful for keywording and research.

So you can pick your keywords and niches not only based on how frequent they are, but also how well they sell.

And yes, I did the some meta-analysis on this which confirms that the more keywords you have, the more sales you get. So you really should pick 40+ keywords per file. Just make sure they're relevant, otherwise they most likely will hurt your ranking in the agencies search engines.

Happy keyword hunting

We store your credentials inside your Dropbox folder and there only. We have to read this information when we make uploads on your behalf of course, but never store this information on our servers, those are actually on read-only file systems.

So security basically depends on how secure your Dropbox account is. With a good password there you should be safe

Video upload is live!

Enable Video for all agencies you want to upload to, drop video files (up to 4GB) into your upload folder and that's it!

Please note that it might take quite a while for uploads to start and finish, we'll upload videos with a limited bandwidth to ensure stable image upload for the rest of the users. We'll monitor how this works and appreciate your feedback - we're still in free beta mode

dropstock.io just enabled video upload! You just put your images, vectors and video files into a specific dropbox folder and we upload them to your agencies by FTP. Big advantage is that you just upload it once, no matter how many agencies you submit to! Plus, DropBox upload is way more reliable than FTP.

It's free at the moment while it's in beta.

Well, not everybody has a fibre connection and not everybody wants to use StockSubmitter or be limited to the handful of agencies they support. I can't really comment on StockSubmitter since we don't get the beta to work reliably on Mac.

Our selling point is that we allow one-click, reliable upload to every agency that supports FTP while optimising your bandwidth and taking care of backups. Platform independent, no installation, no connection- or server issues.

For example we see tons of errors where FTP-servers don't accept new files because their disks ran full or you hit some other limit or transient error. That means you have to remember to retry next day. dropstock.io does that automatically for you.

How useful that is depends on your connection, number of files and agencies and what your time is worth to you. If you spend an hour a month in front of your FTP software or upload pictures through some dodgy public WiFi or upload through your limited cell plan you'll see the appeal.

If StockSubmitter comes up with something similar eventually that would be healthy competition and the users will decide what they prefer.

And it took them a year to build the Mac version alone for 6 agencies with limited features. And that was a year ago and it's still in alpha. And it's software I'd have to install and run on my computer, which is inconvenient at best. For every change in the web frontend of those agencies you'll have to wait for and install a new version and you still have to do all the uploading several times over for each agency.

Lots of reasons to build something better - but that won't be me doing it and that's all I'm trying to bring across here

I understand dropstock.io would be even more useful if it did submission, sales analysis, editing and taking your pictures and delivering coffee to your desk, but I want to focus on doing a few things really good and provide something helpful. So now that's "solving" uploading and next keywording.

Thank you for your feedback and I'm more than happy to discuss any other idea you have to improve dropstock.io or the new keyword tool I mentioned earlier. Auto-submission though is a feature I am not willing to add now or any time soon for the reasons I mentioned.

Oops, thanks, fixing it 

Everything *can* be done, it's just too much work to implement and keep it working for every major agency out there. That's why we don't do it - it would be a full-time job, making the tool expensive and error-prone.

Given the amounts of failed and dormant tools that promised to do this, we prefer to build something we can commit to run and support long-term. We want to give microstockers a reliable tool for their work process and build it up from there.

Feel free to start a kickstarter-campaign for this and once it hits $50k we can hire a developer full-time to integrate all the major agencies for a year

Just added some description to the columns headers that are visible when you hover over the table header. Thanks a lot for the feedback, that was a big miss on our side!

Fair question - a number of agencies provide sales and views statistics through their APIs.
PicNiche obviously uses the Fotolia API to make some basic statistics based on the top 100 pictures the API returns. We go a few steps further to get those numbers based on thousands of matching pictures (vectors, illustrations, videos) from multiple agencies and then breaking down the numbers by keywords.

We strictly focus on the uploading part. I agree there's lots of potential to optimise the actual submission things, but automating and maintaining that for every single agency's website and workflow just isn't feasible.

I do think however, that uploading tons of files to tons of destinations through FTP isn't efficient time- and bandwidth wise. Of course you can upload files with FTP easily enough. But it tends to get cumbersome when uploads start to fail and your bandwidth is split because you upload each file a dozen times to different agencies.

Of course this largely depends on the amount of photos, agencies and your available bandwidth and internet stability. Many of our users are now saving them tens of thousands of manual file uploads by FTP per month and they're pretty happy about it.

We'd love to help them getting rid of the submission, too, but that's not in our scope.

We do however now have a keywording tool, see here: http://www.microstockgroup.com/microstock-services/yet-another-keyword-(research)-tool/

Hi,
we just launched a new keyword tool for finding and researching keywords and niches for your images, vectors and videos.

Yes, there are quite a few of those around already, but this one is a bit different.

Instead of generating keywords based on a handful of matching photos, it analyzes a database of 30+ million photos, vectors, illustrations and videos from several agencies and adds relevant data (frequency, views, sales).
Think of PicNiche and Microstock Keywording Tool having a baby.

So it does not only find tons of keywords for "new york", but also tells you if pictures with "skyline" and "architecture" sell better than "fashion" or "catwalk" in non-tourism pictures at a single glance. So when you're preparing your next photo trip there, you know

You can currently filter by file type, keywords and number of sales.

It's still kind of beta-ish, so we're hoping for your ideas and feedback!

https://www.keyword.io/tool/stock-photo-research