When submitting stock photos it is important to remember that time is money. Money allows you to have more things, or spend more time doing things other than working. Either way it is important to spend our time doing things that matter. That is why I am doing a post on submitting photos to microstock agencies, and how to do it quickly.
The one best thing to do during the editing process is to imbed the keywords and description into the IPTC data. This greatly speeds up the submitting process because the keywords are saved inside the photo. If you take nothing else away from this post take that bit of information away and use it.
I took ten photos from the same trip as I posted about earlier, Get off the trail, and timed the upload process. I did one upload of each of the three main types, ftp, java uploader, and one at a time. We are just looking at the time we put into the process, not the time it takes for the photos to upload, because that can be done while you are asleep at night.
FTP Uploading
FTP uploading is what I prefer, especially if it is paired with a good editing system on the agency’s end, where you can edit multiple photos at once. The upload process took 52 seconds to open the program, select the files, and start them uploading. From the time I went to the website to process the images until the time I finished was two minutes forty-five seconds. Total time for Shutterstock was just over 3 1/2 minutes, which is great for 10 images.
Java Uploader
The Java uploader took 88 seconds to go to the website, login, go to the upload page, and wait for it to load, then drag the photos over and drop them in the uploader. Processing the uploaded images took just over 12 minutes. Total time for Dreamstime was 14 minutes.
One at a Time
Unbearbly slow, that is the only way to describe this method of uploading. It took 46 seconds to get to the upload page. The uploading and processing with iStock took 32 minutes. so it took almost 10 times as long to upload and process images with iStock as with Shutterstock, and over twice as long as with Dreamstime. This is unfortunate as sales are good with iStock, yet I don’t upload a lot because of the uploading process there.
Adding things like location data will increase the amount of time to submit, but may increase your sales.
So, as you can see, one of the limiting factors for microstock photographers is the uploading and processing time.
