Thanks all! 

Steve

How do you find your editorial sales on Adobestock vs. Shutterstock?

That is really hard to answer. I have many more at SS because they take all sorts of editorial, and also I have no way in Microstockr Pro to split out editorial shots. I did this analysis of Adobe by eye - looking at each image that sold and deciding if it was editorial or not.

No way I can do that for SS.

To a large extent, it doesn't matter - I put all files with all agencies that will take them and use Stock Submitter to do that. So the cost of putting a file on an agency is zero so I do it. Relative sales of different types of image then are "interesting" but not "important"

Steve

It has been really slow until the past 30 minutes or so - maybe something has been fixed!

Yes, so did I - and I noticed that on the little map on the contributor page, each of those sales is shown as an unknown location for the buyer. New license type? I hope not!

Steve

I had some questions from the readers of my blog about what exactly an illustrative editorial image is. I've just tried to explain that in a new post and outlined how successful the first two months of my experience with this new usage type has been with Adobe Stock:

https://www.backyardsilver.com/2019/12/adobe-illustrative-editorial-stock-images/

Hope it is helpful for those interested in submitting such shots to Adobe.

Steve

For all of mine I had to take three meals. Not all entrees - you could have a soup, salad and entree. I tended to buy one salad and two entrees because I always looked for something that was easy to plate and towards the end, I had my table top set up with the lights and the camera on a tripod over the table and would take the three shots in maybe 10 minutes. Then we would eat half the food and freeze the rest for a second meal later. That meant I spent more than my allotted allowance, but we got two good meals for two people out of it. I found that the prices are higher on the doordash app than direct from the restaurant, so I tended to visit the restaurant myself instead of having them delivered. That gave me a feel for whether we would ever go back and eat there! Some definitely not!! So you could just about get away with spending the $30 and no more, but it would be hard, to be honest!

It is not a great way to make money and I'm sure is contributing to the downgrade of earnings of proper food photographers (look at one of the comments to this blog post" https://www.backyardsilver.com/2019/10/nice-little-side-earner-with-snapwire/

But there is little creativity in what they want - they define how it is supposed to look and I set up my studio set to replicate that time after time. So I felt comfortable with the process.

Steve

Funnily enough, I wrote a blog post about them yesterday. What did you want to know?

Steve

https://www.backyardsilver.com/2019/12/food-photography-with-doordash/

I keep separate folders for all the JPEGs that have been created for stock uploads on a different physical drive to my original Raw shots. I back up the Raw ones continually onto an external drive, but I've been uploading all the JPEGs to the free Amazon prime drive over the past weeks. I now have 25000 images for 159GB of storage that is all free (obviously I pay for Prime). It all happens in the background - whenever I add a new JPEG to my stock upload folders, it gets backed up to their cloud. I can see them and download them wherever I am, which also helps if someone actually buys an image from my personal stock website and something goes wrong with the delivery!

Steve

For months I have struggled with slow performance from Adobe Lightroom - several seconds delay before the metadata would appear ready for copying between files and although I thought it was linked to the Avast free anti-virus app I have on my Windows 10 machine, nothing I could do in the settings seemed to help. I had discussions on their support forum but basically was told that it was doing what it was supposed to be doing...

Finally I gave up and uninstalled it - Lightroom is now like a happy puppy - eager to take on the next task with joy and anticipation! So if you have this combination and have these issues - this seems to be the only solution I have found. The fuller story is on my blog, but you already know the bottom line.

Steve

https://www.backyardsilver.com/2019/12/lightroom-and-avast-free-anti-virus/

I forgot to talk about which agencies did well for me in November in my previous blog post so I rectified that this morning. No surprises - Shutterstock was my best agency!

https://www.backyardsilver.com/2019/12/review-of-stock-agency-sales-in-november-2019/

Steve

Here is the rest of the story on earnings from me. Very good month with a total of $3418. Not my best ever month, but getting there.



Full details as always on my blog: https://www.backyardsilver.com/2019/12/making-money-as-a-stock-photographer-nov-2019/

Steve

It sounds like a great job to have - but, I do wonder if the earnings will ever be there...

I blog a lot about my earnings from both photos and videos and how many assets I have online on https://www.backyardsilver.com/. As you will see, the earnings from video are very variable. Sometimes it is $600, sometimes $150 or so. But my videos are of topics that are in demand (at least from time to time) and I take things that I believe will form part of a story on a website or perhaps a short clip in some news story on the TV perhaps.

I may be wrong (as I have almost no wildlife shots) but I am not sure what the demand is for clips from a stock agency. Perhaps there are agencies that focus on wildlife videos, but where do you see them being used? The main uses of videos like that are in nature documentaries I suspect, but there, the TV company will be producing their own clips as part of the documentary. Would they use stock clips?

So I don't have an answer for you, but hope these thoughts help you work out if there is an opportunity.

Steve