Managing Microstock

Microstock is a method for selling photographs to a very large audience and get very small returns for every sale. The idea is that if you have enough images out there you can earn a worthwhile income. It is accessible to amateur photographers in a way that traditional stock photography simply is not. You need pro quality, just not pro credentials. With digital workflow the quality problem is much less than it was with film.

As far as money goes, I have not seen too much. I often hear that you need 1000 - 2000 images to realize a steady income; I have less than 100. Image royalties are often 25 cents, though sometimes they can be $20 - 40 USD. It depends on which microstock eCommerce site your photograph sells from, on the size of the image, whether or not the purchaser has a subscription for multiple purchases per day, and whether the licence is good for only adding the photos to a blog or if they will go on product packaging, etc.

I started with microstock in 2007 without much success. I had trouble getting my photos accepted on sites and they sure did not sell very much. The good news is I have figured out what images work and what do not; I know what sort of post production is necessary and I think I have figured out how to keyword. The bad news is that I post each photo to at least 10 different microstock sites.

When I started I was only on iStockphoto and Shutterstock. I used a spreadsheet to help me track what photos were accepted and which ones were rejected and why. It was pretty painful pretty quickly despite my small numbers. Then I found a tool called ProStockMaster. It handled the uploading and helped with the keywording and tracking. It is pretty quirky, but it was a huge improvement over the spreadsheet / manual approach.

I had noticed there were some cloud based services that did similar things to ProStockMaster. They did not support the sites I really cared about, so I did not look too deeply till recently. I was having problems with the ProStockMaster uploads yet again and I had just signed up with Veer which was not supported in ProStockMaster, so I thought it was time to have another look.

A Google search or two and a few blogs eventually got me to a site called PicWorkFlow. It is made specifically for microstock by a photographer that does microstock, so I thought I would give it a try as it supported Veer. You pay a penny per upload and you get a 100 penny credit when you sign up. Unlike ProStockMaster, the PicWorkFlow way uses your bandwidth only once to upload to PicWorkFlow and their bandwidth moves the files to the various microstock sites.

I have tried the tool with about 20 of my images in the last day or so. I am sold! While far from perfect it is a big improvement on ProStockMaster. I am a new contributor on Veer and DepositPhotos, so I have been uploading mostly to those site, but I have updated the tracking information for my other sites including Fotolia, Shutterstock, Dreamstime, iStockphoto, 123RF, CanStockPhoto, BigStockPhoto, and PantherMedia. Everything seems to work, but some of the site is a work in progress. It is not pulling sales data yet and some of the tracking must be done manually, but improvements are promised.

The guy that created the site, Robert Davies, says he is a workflow expert, but I think there is still some work to do in this area. When I want to put a photo on a microstock site, there are several things I want to do using PicWorkFlow. First I upload to their site, then I fix up metadata, then I decide where I want the image to go, once the images are sent I need to go to the microstock sites and finalize their submission requirements, and finally I want to track my sales. I can do most of that stuff with PicWorkFlow, but I need to manually remember or move my photos from one step to the next.

There is a grouping feature, but it is very cumbersome to use. I created groups called Prepare for upload, Ready for upload, Verify uploads, and Complete. I put the images in Prepare for upload first during the import process, so I can work on the metadata. When I have finished that step I remove the image from that group and add it to Ready for upload. I need to do this manual step, in and out, each time a photo moves along my workflow. Quirkiness continues when I finish all stages in the workflow and remove the last photo; the group disappears. There must be an easier way. 

The tool also has a few quirks that take some getting used to. I am using Google Chrome browser, one of the recommended ones for this site. To start with, the top menu expands horizontally rather than vertically. It expands as the mouse hovers over the main option and disappears if you happen to move the mouse a little off the menu bar. Another strange thing is how you change the status on an image. You can set the status to untasked, pending authorization, review accepted, review rejected. It seems simple enough, but you need to click several different places to achieve the various combinations. It is not intuitive. These are just two of many. In general it seems the intent is to keep the user interface clean, and it is, but it should not be weird.

Bugs seem minimal. I have only noticed one so far. It was fairly innocuous. I was able to get the global change panel to repeat itself by clicking on it repeatedly. Other than that all has been good. I am going to stick with it and see how it progresses.

Quirks and all, PicWorkFlow is the most promising solution I have see for multisite image management and well worth the penny to costs for an upload.