. Personally I have looked for images at Stocksy quite a few times and never yet found what I needed, which is usually culturally-diverse lifestyle images. I need  fun, natural-feeling, unposed images and for god's sake, please don't make the models look at the camera.

As a stocksy contributor i am surprised by this comment. They have been the champion of culturally-diverse content for years, (so much so that I won't use blonde-haired caucasian models at all), as well as authentic, fun, non-stocky looking imagery. And you've no idea how many, many declines I get for "camera aware" expressions.

da vinci resolve has a free version. but "removing a logo" in video is not exactly beginner's work.....

I saw this recently on a shopping site, the "model" was clearly not an actual human. For fast fashion they'll do anything to cut costs.

I do stock f/t but I'm not the family breadwinner. I could probably survive on my own living in Thailand on what i make, but living in Australia is expensive, kids are expensive. I make a really decent part-time wage, and given i'm the stay at home mum, it's been the perfect job that has allowed me to freedom to be home with my kids, and still work when I choose. I wish I'd started earlier than I did, I seem to have missed the good ol days.

I don't sell on Canva, and from having read a bunch of posts on this website over a number of months, I'd get the impression that Canva is of the devil. The curious part is that I've heard the founder of Canva on a bunch of popular entrepreneur type podcasts on number of times over the last few years, including pretty recently. The impression I get from the podcasts are that Canva is seemingly a pretty well run business. For a private company they have already achieve unicorn status, ie worth over a billion dollars. https://mashable.com/2018/01/09/canva-unicorn-status/. Clearly all your sales have dropped on that platform because they no longer value your work and no longer need it. They have other suppliers now.

I've heard good things about the founder, but these types, these "disruptors" often don't understand that they are ruining the businesses of others who came before them. They are piggybacking on that hard work and claiming some moral high ground with this term "disruptor". They seem to have a really great employee situation, but that's as far as it goes. In the end, they're in it for the money, until either someone else comes along and "disrupts" them, and I can't say I'll be sorry for them, or, more likely, she'll sell the business for a small fortune to someone even worse.

great news Matt!

Hello, I'm new here, my name is Heidi. Is it a right place to introduce myself?

I feel like I should offer a trigger warning, but that might be against the culture here. HA. Welcome, strap in, there are no wooyays here, it's brutally honest. Have a read, I'm sure at least half your questions have been answered already. There are some amazing veterans lurking here, sometimes they venture out.

Part of being in the co-op is acknowledging your commitment to Stocksy. That's part of the culture. Now there are many who don't bother to upload at all, and for a while we discussed what to do about those people, and the solution that came out was to lift the cap to allow more members in (rather than suspend non-performing members). As Sean said, your performance isn't monitored, and there are many ways to ask for help if you need it. 

I've had the same experience with Getty recently (I left istock years ago) so i will no longer be giving them video

Clue/Opinion and I'm not alone. That discoverability is a computer saying, your image is more discoverable, not a fact or promise. Your images may be less discoverable after forcing too many keywords, and a poorer match if you are writing longer titles and descriptions just to have a different color show and suggest you are going to be "more discoverable" because a dot or highlight changed colors.

Don't worry, just do what's right for a proper description and best keywords.

good advice, and I checked on my sales and they were all "poor discoverability" anyway.  I've finally put in some effort to work out which line in Bridge metadata gets the title imported (it's the Description in case you use Bridge too) so now when they get accepted they are already "on sale" so i dont have to bother going in and doing anything.

Ah, nothing to do with disambiguation.

The 'discoverability' thing is a very poorly thought-out  (to put it politely) notion of Alamy (they have them, just like all the rest) which as you suggest leads to spam.
Even if you don't spam, for most images tryng to get to 42 keywords would lead to keywording small features of an image which are pretty irrelevant, meaning your views will increase but not your zooms/sales, which allegedly might knock back your Alamy Rank. Also remember that on Alamy any word from the caption can be merged with any keyword, even one word from a keyword phrase, also giving irrelevant views and hitting your click through rate. I normally get at least one of these search malgorithms daily. Eg today I have a hit for Turkish Tent, which is a Turkish musician performing in a tent. (But in particular, if you have an image of Joe Bloggs and Jane Doe, your image will show up on searches for Joe Doe, Jane Bloggs, Joe Jane, etc. Sometimes these mismatches show higher in the search than images of the real Joe Doe / whatever, but it's not so bad at the moment.

The more keywords you have, the most likely these malgorithms are to happen.

FWIW, I have fewer than 5% of my file with 'good discoverability' and these are all files with either a lot of location specific keywords or a lot of subject specific keywords, e.g. if it's a species which has recently had its name or classification changed, I'll put in the old and new terms, as many people don't keep absolutely up to date with these changes, and some regard them as 'dubious'.

In case you're not convinced, at the time when they introduced the current system, Alamy put up a video showing how the system worked, and they only used 16 (sixteen) keywords:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DeGewd73uw

FWIW, ATM and for over a year past, words in captions have ranked highter than in keywords, so make sure all your important keywords are in the caption.

The issues arising from the stupid discoverability thing have been discussed here a few times, and over on the Alamy forum many times. Alamy have never jumped in to explain why it's a good idea - but nor have they removed the feature).

And finally, if it's not a Live News or archival/reportage image, you can't have a 'super long caption': these are limited to 150 characters and have nothing to do with discoverability.
Correction: as mentioned above, your caption has everything to do with real discoverability, but nothing to do with Alamy's stupid 'discoverability' feature.

sorry, alamy call it "annotate". I couldn't think of what other word to use. I wasn't sure what the secret sauce was to get the green "good visibility" status, as I have images with 40 keywords that are green, but others needed 42 or more. If you  add some of the Optional options you get a tiny boost in that orange line, however I don't see having a longer description helping as you pointed out.  I will in the future try to add more kw to my description. The YT tutorial doesn't address this.  I'll search here and see if anyone has more clues.

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).

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's part of the job. But, you can do it whilst watching a movie so it's not all bad.

Quote from: Sean Locke Photography on August 04, 2019, 20:15

Nope.

Give it time, you will get better. We were all bad at the beginning. 

BAHAHAHAHAHAHA
(that needed more than a like)
Sean if you need any tips, just reach out....

but srsly, clients don't understand how amazing stock is as a training program for all types of work.  I don't mind sending clients to Stocksy to view my work, they will see some good price points there.