Hi,

I am brand new here so please be nice

I am an experienced photographer and well travelled and hence a fairly extensive collection of stock. After 5 years I am now only really giving stock a good go. basically after reading some Kindle books. My website is www.filedimage.com if anyone is interested.

Anyhow I am an experienced user of Lightroom and make extensive use of Smart collections for auto uploading to my Zenfolio hosted site. Works well. The only thing ive never worked out is how to categorise images upon where you upload to. I used to add a keyword for different agencies but thats very rookie. I tried colour coding, but some images go to more than one stock agency. Manually dragging to a folder isnt ideal as id like to be able to filter in my folders for images not uploaded.

Any ideas?

Thanks,

Chris

Why don't you submit them all photos to all agencies? Unless you have a very high level of editorial shots, that seems to work OK for me.

I keyword and describe in my main catalog and "flag" the images that I intend to upload. I then export those images to a new folder on a different drive that is organized by month. So all the images in the March2013 folder are for upload in that month, even though they may have been taken over the previous months. The second drive means that I have a backup (in JPEG form) of all the images that are destined for stock agencies. I then FTP the images to Lightburner and they distribute to the 20 or so agencies that get my photos.

Not sure if it was my book on stock that you read on Kindle, but I did have a chapter about the detailed workflow using Lightroom. I've been using it for 3 years or so, and it has always worked fine for me.

Steve

Chris

Great to meet a satisfied reader!! (please put a comment on Amazon if you don't mind!)

Lightburner is a bit temperamental until you get the various channels (links to the stock agencies) set up. I have 20 channels active at the moment and all of them are working fine - although there did seem to be a glitch with CanStockPhoto this last week that I need to investigate. Sometimes the agencies change their FTP details, which screws things up. Generally however, I assume that if it goes to Lightburner, then it has gone to the stock agency. Recently they started sending out an email that shows which images went to each site - worth checking that for any errors.

So, my basic flow is to assume that all my images that were keyworded in Lightroom went to the agency. I then visit each agency in turn to complete the process. A few agencies don't require this, but most have some sort of final step on the site. This is also my double check point, as if I see that my images are not there for submitting, I can reupload them if necessary.

I have around 10% editorial images in my portfolio, and normally those get uploaded along with the rest. I use the Shutterstock caption, which seems to work for all sites. Those sites that don't accept editorial usually just reject them. Other sites where I need to submit images one by one on the site (eg Fotolia), I delete the editorial ones as I come across them. Finally, some sites get really annoyed if you submit editorial images to them (GL comes to mind!) - I have a separate monthly process where I quickly go through a month's worth of submitted images in Lightroom and I separate them into those that don't need any releases and those that are editorial (I mark those with 1 star when I am keywording) and I just do a monthly FTP to GL, for instance for the non-editorial shots. For some historic reason I also do this for Pond5, although I think this was more to do with the complications of adding a model release I think. Probably not necessary, but I haven't got round to changing.

I ought to update the Lightburner chapter in my book to add the things I have learned in the past year about keeping it going, and perhaps going through each site in turn to explain what settings work for me. Maybe my next task!

Steve

Chris

Fotolia works OK for me - and when I checked just now it looks like I am using the standard Fotolia "channel" with my user number and password. Some of the others needed a separate FTP channel to work, but not this one.

Glad my workflow made sense and has helped! And thanks for the glowing review on Amazon - that channel to the market seems to be picking up for me this year, and great reviews like yours really help.

If you need any more help (or have ideas for what I should cover in issue 3 of the book), please email me directly if you prefer - my email address is "sales" at "BackyardSilver.com"

Steve

I have had problems loading editorial to iStock with the shutterstock caption.... they get rejected for all CAPS, and not having enough info.  I like using Lightroom for my catalog, but don't want to have to caption for different sites.

Glenn

Glenn

Good catch - I use Deepmeta for iStock, and when I mark that as editorial, it automatically copies some of the title into the editorial caption. It sometimes gets the date wrong as well - so I always create a new editorial caption for iStock and don't use Capitals. They also don't care about the second use of the date as required by SS. Finally, I don't think they care about the "newsworthy fact" that you need to add for SS.

I meant to say that I have no issues with the SS editorial format for other sites apart from iStock and I use Deepmeta to create an appropriate caption for them.

Steve

Please feel free to email me direct if you wish - and thanks for the review on Amazon for my book!

I gave up on Stockmon a couple of years back - I think he stopped updating the plugins and as the websites changed, it became less useful. I don't bother to track the sites regularly any more - I tend to look at SS every day, iStock (although that is getting less interesting) and occasionally at some of the others. I then do my full accounting at the end of the month.

I think there are other services to track income - lets see if anyone else chips in!

Steve

I use a similar method to Trans. I define keywords that don't export but I spell them in ALL CAPS so they will stand out in the keyword lists. Then I use those keywords to create special collections that show where an image is in my workflow.

Can you recommend a program to monitor sales.

ta

www.stockperformer.com and 'microstock analytics' are two that I am aware of.