Uploading

I have been getting some questions from friends on Facebook about uploading so thought I would expand on my answers a bit here to try and keep all the info in one place.

It seems that for exclusive iStockers contemplating independence the foremost worry is the amount of time and effort involved in uploading to multiple sites. Before I became independent I was told by an indie contact that they were able to upload their images to nine other sites in the time it took to upload to iStock alone. My experience so far bears that out. I think the upload interface at iStock is archaic and probably would have been changed for the better years ago were it not for Deepmeta. As most of you should know, Deepmeta is Franky De Meyer's excellent prog which allows automation and batch processing of the iStock upload procedure. You point it at your images, keyword and categorise, attach releases and go to bed. In the morning the new images are all there, sitting in your upload queue.

The question I was asked was 'do other sites have an equivalent to Deepmeta'. Well no, (I don't think so) because they don't need one - the upload interface acts in much the same way. I have written on here a few times about the benefits of putting keywords into metadata- it is a bit of a lifesaver and so far all my sites read this data without problems. Also all the sites allow multiple uploads, though I haven't tried to upload in batches of more than ten. These images then go into a 'holding area' from where you chose categories, attach releases (stored on the agency's site) and submit. You can do this days or weeks later, but some sites delete unfinished uploads after a month. I tend to set a batch to upload while I am cooking dinner or whatever, then categorise and submit at a later time when I am able to concentrate on it properly. The time consuming part (ie data transfer) does not require you to be present while it is going on.

Several sites then allow autofilling of categories from a previous image, which makes the uploading of a series very quick indeed. Others leave the last categories chosen in the selection box for the next image or have an easily accessible shortlist of recently chosen categories you can pick from.

Shutterstock seems to read the description info from CNX metadata as the title, which maybe deliberate as they don't also have a description field. I just leave it as the site chooses it and try and keep my descriptions fairly terse. Unfortunately Bigstock require the description to be a minimum of seven words. This is a bit of a pain as I always forget and write a minimal description with Shutterstock's titles in mind. It is easy to correct during upload to Bigstock, but it adds time and is worth remembering when you are adding keyword/description info to the metadata. Somewhere between seven and twenty words is probably ideal.

There are other ways of uploading such as FTP, which is supposed to make things even easier yet, but I haven't had chance to get my head round the technology to make that work so far. Hopefully a techy, newly-independent person will come by shortly and tell us all how to do it.

'Well,' I hear you say, 'if it is all so quick and simple then why haven't you uploaded more images so far?!' My answer to that would be that for uploading in quantity to multiple sites the following is required:

1 - The time and head space to keep track of what image needs to go where.

2 - Good quality internet access without restrictive bandwidth limits.

3 - All your images on the same computer, in the same place at the same time.

Number three I still don't have, number two I got three days ago and number one might happen sometime towards the end of 2011, but I'm not counting on it.

Other things to mention re Shutterstock:

As I have said before, they don't like images which have been cropped at all.

They also don't seem to find images taken on a D300 with an F2.8 lens with no sharpening (then sharpened in RAW) to be crisp enough for them at full res. There doesn't seem to be any penalty for having a low acceptance rate and all images are effectively 'can resubmit' so I am just sending them at full res for now, but will downsize and resubmit the rejections later. I am still only getting about half accepted there. They will also reject your images for a host of other reasons - they rejected one of my best-selling iStock images today for 'limited commercial value'. I don't think there is really much that can be done about this - it's just how it is. There is a box which allows for comments to the reviewer to be made, so I might try resubmitting with a plea and link to iS, but I am not going to hold my breath.

Ken (picturelake) told me that I was the first person he had heard of that was accepted to Shutterstock at the first attempt. In order to get through you need to have seven of your ten submissions accepted. If you fail at this then you will have to wait a full month before you can reapply. My advice is to chose your ten images very very carefully and downsize if necessary. They need to be your most punchy 'stocky' images as well as technically top-drawer.

Sorry this has been such a long post - anyone still awake?

New forum site

I have opened a forum for us to discuss independence matters - you can find the link on this page in the right-hand pane (beneath the blog archive index). If that doesn't work then you can try this link:

http://the-independence-day-forum.983074.n3.nabble.com/

Have at it ;-)

Passing the hat

With Christmas over and the New Year nearly upon us it seems that some disgruntled iStockers may be about to take action and become independent. It was good to hear yesterday that Josh (Doxadigital) had taken the plunge and given notice. If you don't know him already he is the originatior of the 'Push for' race thread on iS and an all-round good guy. He is also a bit of a stat-head, so in future expect some in-depth analysis (complete with pretty pictures) at this blog here.

I hate to do this, but now I'm afraid it is time to pass the hat. If you have found this blog useful then can I ask that you use my referral links when opening new accounts with other agencies. It won't cost you anything as the wee kickback I will receive will come directly from the agency. I can promise that there will be no hard feelings if you chose not to, but times are hard and so I thought I would ask... I did this when opening my accounts as a way of thanking a couple of my indie friends who had been generous with their time and information before I made the big leap. I think mostly this works by using the links at the top of this page to access the site, then move on to the 'become a contributor' link or whatever. I think some of them also require you to type in my referral code number so I will print those below. The two major ones are Shutterstock and Dreamstime so even if you only gave me the referral hit for those then I would be very grateful (click below to go to the registration page). ETA - Actually the only three I would get anything from are the ones below:

Shutterstock: ref=661795

Dreamstime: res2635685

Bigstock: pAatX27Xn4

Whatever happens it would be good to hear from any of you that do go indie over the coming months. I was thinking of using one of these free forum hosting sites to set up a wee indie forum for us all - do you think that would be useful? I know that some of these already exist, but I feel that we are a fairly unique group and the forums at iS can be a bit of a wrench to leave behind. I know that I don't feel that great about posting there anymore (in spite of having left on good terms), but that might not be the case for many of you.

Merry Christmas and thanks in advance to any of you who do use my referrals.

Big push for the New Year

My sales now seem to be winding down for Christmas so this is a good time to work on uploading with the aim of getting more sales in the New Year. I lost my uploading mojo for a wee bit there, but the EL at Veer has fired me up again.

I popped into the iStock forums today and was disturbed (but not surprised) to read that many contributors will not be making the RC goal and did not see the promised 50% of annual revenue in the last four months of the year. All I can say to you is - come and join me - this indie malarkey is fun and stress-free. The different sites give you different information regarding your sales, which taken as a whole can offer a very valuable insight into who is buying your images and where they hail from (via Shutterstock's excellent new world map feature) and also what keywords they used to find your image (via Dreamstime's sales log). I think in the long run this decision will make me a far better stock photographer.

EL on Veer

Nice.... just got an EL on Veer, which with attendant L sale put about 47 bucks in the pot. Very, very nice.

Click here to sign up with Veer, you know you want to.....

November stats

Once again apologies for the lack of posts here - things were just starting to improve when we had a massive snowfall here in Edinburgh which has made life tough in all sorts of new ways. So I am still not able to devote much time to stock and in particular uploading.

As you will see from the spreadsheet, my income for November was just a couple of bucks higher than October. I was exclusive at iStock for the first two weeks of October so I have managed to make a little headway with my independent earnings to compensate for that in November. Although my indie income figures aren't great, I think they are ok considering the relatively few images I have uploaded to each site. In image terms what I have online so far is about 10% of what I have available so I am still quite optimistic about earning considerably more as an indie than I did as an iStock exclusive.

The figure of $23 for Dreamstime has been inflated by the $14 I received from their 'dash for cash' type promotion, otherwise it would have been remarkably similar to my Fotolia earnings. I had one small EL in November on Fotolia, for which I received five credits or about five dollars (so not much really).

Veer have at last started reviewing my images and have so far accepted a high percentage of them. This is consistent with what I have heard about them from others. They didn't start reviewing these til the very end of the month, so the two sales I had there came from my tiny portfolio of nine initial application images. As such it does make me feel quite hopeful for my future earnings there. I like Veer. Give them a try, but remember to be very, very patient.

Sorry...

Sorry I haven't posted much lately - I have been very busy with other things and too tired in the evenings to think much about stock. I will try for a proper update later this week.

Messy spreadsheet

Now that I have had sales with seven different agencies the spreadsheet is begining to look a bit messy. If anyone fancies having a go at redesigning it for me I would be very grateful...

Selling them cheap, piling them high.

I had a great day today, with 21 sales across all agencies. Quite a few of these came from images I uploaded over the weekend, so it has been great to be getting some returns from that effort already.

I should maybe say that the figure shown on my spreadsheet for Fotolia earnings is an estimate. Fotolia show earnings as credits which then equate to a conversion rate in your home currency. So I have to convert from credits to pounds to dollars for the sake of the spreadsheet and I can't always be bothered (not every day anyway!) Bear with me, I will try and get it accurate for the end of month total.

Income Stats for October

As you can see from the spreadsheet, my final earnings for October were $213.86. As expected, this was quite a way down from previous months where I averaged about $350. I dropped exclusivity roughly mid-month at iStock with $115.96 of income at that point, so made $77.20 there as an independent in the remaining half of the month. Income from other agencies combined for a lowly $20.70 - to be expected given that I had only a few images for sale for a short period of time.

So too early to be able to draw any meaningful conclusions from this, apart from the obvious - there will be a lean period as you transistion from exclusive to indie. I am still confident that I will be able to match my exclusive income at some point, but that will obviously be dictated by the speed at which I upload to other sites.

My portfolio is finally visible on Dreamstime so I start the month with a presence of sorts on all the big four sites. I'm off now to do some more keywording into Exif - a wee tip for any non-Americans looking to get a head start with this - Shutterstock don't recognise non-US spellings so you will have to use color, aluminum etc instead of the proper spellings.....

Acceptance rates for the first fifty images

I have now had my first fifty images reviewed at all the sites I have uploaded to with the exception of Veer. Two weeks on, my images are still in their queue and from what I have heard I may have to wait a month or two more yet. It is pretty ridiculous, but the situation was aparently caused by their 'dash for cash' promotion where they offered cash for each image uploaded before a certain date. Once that backlog has cleared then Veer hope to have review times down to a week, but that hasn't happened yet. They aparently have a big marketing push booked for this autumn so hopefully the files that do make it onto the site will see some sales.

The list below shows how many of my fifty images have been accepted at each site: (I haven't made these up btw - they have just worked out weirdly sequential).

Canstock - 41/50 = 82%
Dreamstime - 42/50 = 84%
Fotolia - 43/50 = 86%
Bigstock - 44/50 = 88%
DepositPhotos - 45/50 = 90%
Shutterstock - 29/50 = 58%

I know it is a small sample, but the results are fairly uniform until you get to the Shutterstock figure. The fact that it is so wildly out does give me some comfort - it is not me, it really is Shutterstock being very picky. Probably the most head-shaking example was when they rejected a shot of Edinburgh Castle for 'limited commercial value' (well, who wants to look at that old thing anyway?!).

The results from the other sites I am totally fine about. 47 of these images were previously accepted on iStock - two were new images and one was an iS reject. As I said in answer to an earlier comment, inspection is a subjective process and I did not ever expect 100% of these images to be accepted at all sites. This is some of my best stuff though, so acceptance rates of 80-odd percent seem about right. It's probably petty of me, but I was very pleased that the iS reject was accepted everywhere ....

Even though quite a lot of my images were rejected at Shutterstock there is still hope for them on that site. It seems to only be iStock that does the 'can resubmit/cannot resubmit' thing, the other sites all seem to be fine about resubmissions (as an unrelated new upload) once the problem is fixed. Two things I have learnt though from my SS rejects - they don't like shallow DOF nor do they want images which are cropped in any way, even if this provides more impact for the image. I wanted to show you an example, but I can't get the 'add image' thingy to work on here, so you will have to click on this link if you want to see an example of an image that didn't make it on many sites, aparently as the crop made it unlikely to be used. This cheesy little number has sold 19 times on iStock since I uploaded it at the begining of the year (so relatively successful for me). There were some images I uploaded knowing that there was a chance they would be challenged, but this one really surprised me.

Things have moved very quickly at Fotolia - my images were all inspected within 24 hours and I have had a couple of sales there already. I wish I could say the same about Dreamstime, but after my account was locked down (something to do with me telling them I was still exclusive at iS when I registered - registration and uploading being entirely different things after all) my images took two weeks to be inspected and they do not yet appear to be visible for sale. I have heard good things about Dreamstime so I will try and stay patient and put it down to teething troubles.

That is probably it for now, I will post something on Monday once I have the final figures for October.

New portfolio links added

I have added a few more portfolio links on the bar above, having had images go live now on Dreamstime, Fotolia and Bigstock. I have a few more images to be inspected at Fotolia but would expect those to go through later today. I was hesitant about uploading there as I had heard about them cutting commision levels in the past (are they iStock in disguise?), but an indie friend convinced me that as one of the 'big four' (Shutterstock, iStock, Dreamstime and Fotolia), I should really be selling there. Their review times are very quick and inspections seem fair so far. Once the rest of my images there go through I will post a bit more about inspections as I will have an (admittedly small) comparative study to offer now that my 'first fifty' have done the rounds. An interesting pattern has emerged.....

My sales have been good at iStock, aparently bearing out my opinion that at exclusive prices my files were too expensive there. I have been pleasantly surprised by sales there as I had expected to be wiped out by the best-match non-exclusive penalty. It may be that these sales have come from images which were previously lightboxed by buyers and that I will not feel the full effect of poorer BM placement until a bit later on. But I am guessing, cos who knows? It is too early to tell so is all just guesswork at this stage.

There have been some interesting discussions going on in the 'comments' sections of these posts so be sure to check those out if you haven't done so already.

The first fifty

I have now finished uploading my first fifty images to my initial three sites and have begun sending them to some of the other sites on my list.

Shutterstock continue to be frustratingly picky, with only 29 of 50 accepted (58%). All of these were images which were previously accepted on iStock (where I had an acceptance rate in the high seventies). Probably the most annoying rejections are for 'limited commercial value' when applied to images which have sold well previously and therefore have a proven commercial value.

Something seems to have gone wrong at Dreamstime and all my 50 uploads are stuck in their queue, uninspected. I have sent an email to support and am waiting to hear back.

The only other site worthy of note at the moment is CanStock, who have reviewed all my images very quickly and accepted a very high percentage of them. No sales there yet, or anywhere else either with the continued exception of Shutterstock, where sales have been reasonably brisk. I have also had a couple of non-subscription sales there, which helps a bit. I think I could do well there if I could just get more images accepted.

I know you are out there, I can hear you breathing...

I have had a bit of feedback that some of you haven't been able to post comments on here due to not having a blogger account. I have now changed the settings to allow anyone to comment and also to allow anonymous comments. Please do post if you have any comments or questions, it is good to get feedback and a bit like talking to myself otherwise.

I am also aware that the link to my Dreamstime portfolio isn't working - that is because they still haven't reviewed any of my images yet. I will let you know when that happens.

Many thanks for all the positive comments I have received so far.

Shutterstock update and application processes

I had my first (rather bruising) encounter with the Shutterstock inspectors last night. Of a batch of 20 images they rejected nine - all but one of these for focus issues. I was surprised as all of these images had previously been accepted on iStock, which I certainly found very tough on quality standards. Although the new images are still not visible in my account, I have had one sale from them so far, bringing my Shutterstock total to nine. Of the three agencies I am submitting to so far, Shutterstock wins hands down on speed of application approval, inspection time and lead-time to first sales. Several of you have commented on the royalty amount and it is true that .25c is not a lot. This payment is for their subscription plan, which I have been told makes up the vast majority of sales on Shutterstock. The 25c does however increase over time, based on lifetime earnings. Once I have earned over $500 on the site I would qualify for the 33c rate, over $3000 for the 36c rate and over $10,000 for the 38c rate. Admittedly 38c is still not a lot, but I have been promised that download volume makes up for it, we shall see.

The initial application process for the three agencies (Shutterstock, Dreamstime and Veer) are all pretty much the same. If you are about to embark upon a similar journey you will need to have a scan of your passport ready and (if you are not from the US) to be prepared to fill out a US tax form to avoid having 30% tax deducted from your royalties at source. In all cases this is a fairly simple and painless process. As I have said before, Shutterstock and Veer then require you to submit ten images for review before you can start selling - if accepted then these images become 'live' for sale right away.

Of the three agencies, I chose Shutterstock and Dreamstime as I had been told by other independents that they were their biggest earners. To be honest I have heard very little good about Veer - their inspection times are said to be very slow and sales poor to non-existent, but they have such a nice site that I thought I would give it a go. Their royalty rates are good and the site is by far the easiest, simplest and most helpful to use. It is clean and uncluttered and functions well, which seems to be everything a site should be. Ok, their attempts at dude-speak are a little cringey, but I could forgive them that if they would just make me some money.

In second place for ease of use is Shutterstock, with Dreamstime quite a long way behind. I find the Dreamstime site very hard to get used to and it seems uneccesarily complicated to me, for instance with a phenomenal list of image categories, many of which seem to overlap or duplicate each other. They do seem to have good royalty and referral rates however and I am currently trying to make the most of their '20c for every image online by 15th November' deal being offered to former iStock exclusives.

I have a bunch of other sites I am also going to try once I get the hang of things. Keeping it to three sites at the moment feels managable while I am learning new ways of doing things and getting systems in place to try to keep on top of what image needs to go where.

I have found that all three of my 'phase 1' sites read keywords from the metadata of an image. This means that by opening up an image in CNX and adding keywords, description and title, I can save a lot of time when it comes to submitting to each site. The extra CNX step is slowing me down at the moment as I work through my back-catalogue, but in future I will just add the keywords to the metadata as I process each new image. One of my independent contacts told me that they could upload to nine sites in the time it took to submit the same image to iStock alone and I am beginning to understand why that is. My next step is to learn how to configure FTP uploading as I believe this will streamline the process further still. All of my three new sites offer some way of batch-processing new images too, another way in which the upload process can be a lot quicker than at iStock.

More sales

I have now had three sales on Shutterstock, which from only seven images online seems pretty good to me. I will post more later tonight about the different agencies I am submitting to and plan to submit to and the different interfaces/requirements for each one.

Exclusivity at iStockphoto comes to an end

My exclusive notice period at iStockphoto expired yesterday, but my crown and image pricing didn't change until this afternoon. It feels good. I will always be grateful to iStock for the start and training they have given me, but I am ready to move on now. I don't believe that the company I joined in 2008 is the same company that exists today, which has made this decision a lot easier.

With that in mind I submitted my application to three agencies last night: Shutterstock, Veer and Dreamstime. The first two have an application process which requires ten images to be submitted for review before you can begin to contribute. Shutterstock require seven out of the ten images to be accepted in order for the application to go through. I am not sure what the Veer qualifications are, but I can say that I have passed both company's assessments already! Shutterstock took just four hours to respond that I had been accepted, while Veer reached the same conclusion some time during the night. I thought it would take several days to be processed, so I was very surprised at how quickly it all went through. On Shutterstock, seven of my initial ten images were accepted and on Veer the number accepted was nine. I was very pleased that in both cases the rejections were for deemed copyright issues, rather than technical reasons. Dreamstime take four to five days to review images but don't require a contributor assessment beforehand.

When I woke up and found my Shutterstock acceptance email I went straight to the site and was very pleased to see that I had a sale already. Only 25c in the pot, but it feels great to have made a sale from only seven images available.

Background - iStockphoto

I came across iStockphoto in April of 2008 while looking to buy images for a website I was planning to set up. The possibility of submitting images to the site renewed a long-held interest in photography and led me to buy my first DSLR, a Sony A350 and a couple of kit lenses. I had thought myself a fairly competent film photographer so it came as a bit of a shock to find how different digital photography was and just how much I had to learn.

I was accepted as a contributor on iStock at the second attempt in May 2008, began submitting images and was very pleased when they started selling. I also had plenty of submissions rejected and it was through this process that I began to slowly learn how to take technically competent digital images. I didn't qualify for exclusivity at the time, so I also applied to sell on Shutterstock, but became frustrated with them after my photographer application was rejected twice, the second time using images which had been accepted and were selling well on iStock. That was probably where my loyalty to iStock began - I also made a lot of friends on the forums and got a lot of help and advice there. On the basis of some of that advice I traded in the Sony for a Nikon D300 and began ploughing my iStock earnings into accumulating F2.8 Nikkor lenses.

I hit bronze (250 downloads) in December of 2008 and became exclusive with iStock. I was very glad to have reached that point, particularly for the 'best match' boost that exclusivity brings. Contributing elsewhere was pretty much unthinkable by then. I was very grateful for having been given the opportunity to learn 'on-the-job' and would bore any of my friends who would listen about the wonders of iStock.

For the next year I put a lot of effort into my portfolio and began to see some tangible results. One of my iStock friends called me 'the queen of useful' and it is fairly accurate to say that while I do not have access to models, a studio, etc I try to make the most of what I find around me. I think it is a great testament to the industry model created by iStock that I am able to make money from photography in this way. I was starting to see the potential for making iStock part of my regular reliable income so it was with great sadness that I had to sell my D300 and all my lenses for financial reasons in December of 2009.

Unfortunately this co-incided with iStock's announcement that canister threshold levels were to change. For those of you not familiar with iStock, commision level is dictated by amount of downloads each exclusive contributor has. The system that had been in place since the creation of the exclusivity programme in 2004 was bronze (250 downloads) 25% commision, silver (2500 downloads) 30%, gold (10,000 downloads)35% and diamond (25,000 downloads) 40% commision. With regular downloads, my arrival at silver level was reliably predictable at May 2010 but the proposal to move the silver goalpost from 2,500 to 5,000 in February 2010 meant that I would not get there in time.

While this seemed inherently unfair, the announcement was softened by the introduction of the E+ program, which brought with it a higher price point for exclusive content. So while I might have to wait for my extra 5% commision (an increase of 20% in real terms) I should be better off as a result of my files being more expensive. As it was, the canister changes were postponed (allowing me to reach silver in May 2010 after all) while the E+ changes went ahead in March 2010. If you look at my income figures you will see a fairly sharp decline at that point. I guess not everyone's images are worth the higher price point and mine don't seem to be.

It is fairly obvious that in order to make more money you need more images for sale. I uploaded some back-catalogue images for a while, but once those ran out I was stuck. A friend came to the rescue with a loan of money to buy a D5000 and with the addition of a couple of old manual focus Nikkor lenses sourced from eBay I was back in business. While this combo should produce perfectly good images I found it very difficult to get any accepted on iStock and quickly became despondent. I also had some fairly substantial personal life issues to deal with so photography went on the back burner for the summer of 2010. By September I felt ready to get back to submitting images again. While I find manual focus and exposure difficult in a travel-photography context (no split screen focus on a DSLR), I felt that I could control it far better in a studio setting. I found a small studio space to rent just round the corner and agreed to lease it on Monday 6th September. As many of you will know, on Tuesday 7th September Kelly Thompson, CEO of iStock dropped a bombshell on contributors: the planned canister threshold changes would not go ahead after all, instead they would be replaced by a whole new system of 'referred credits'. Under this system it will be the number of credits used to purchase an image that counts, not the number of downloads. The announcement was greeted with surprise and a great deal of understandable anger from contributors. While there is a lot of fairness in a system that rewards those who sell images in larger sizes, the thresholds which had been decided upon penalised most contributors of silver level or above and would see the majority of them take a cut of 5% in commision levels. It should be remembered that equates to a far greater cut in real terms and also that these are the very contributors on whose work the success of the site has been built. I checked my newly-published level of referred credits, did some calculations and worked out that the new system would see me take a 16.6% pay cut in 2011. This is not unsual and is not the worst I have heard of.

At the same time, plans for new content known as 'The Agency Collection' were announced. This would allow other agencies to place large quanties of images on iStock which would be sold at far higher prices than the existing content. I felt that the site was no longer a place where a hard-working amateur could make their way, but rather an extension of it's parent company Getty. Under the new system, taking time off from submitting images for whatever reason could result in the referred credit goal being missed. The old mantra of 'shoot, upload, repeat' would become a treadmill, penalising part-time contributors. Even worse - the required numbers of referred credits would be adjusted by the company every year in order to make sure their profits were as desired. Even if you did reach the goal, the goalposts may well be moved again, depriving you of what you had worked all year to attain.

It was at this point that I parted company with iStock.

I know that there will be a great number of other contributors who like me, have 'grown up' on iStock who will be curious to find out how I get on as an independent (particularly in dollar terms), which is the reason behind this blog. I will be transparent about my historic income from iStock and my future income from other agencies. My exclusivity at iStock falls on the 12th of October 2010. I will write about the different agencies I am applying to and the application/submission process. I hope also to deal with all the issues that concern contributors regarding dropping exclusivity ie upload times, keywording, agency selection, possible loss of income etc.

If I fall flat on my face, I will do it very publicly ;-)

You can find an up-to-date spreadsheet of my iStockphoto earnings here.