Stock Photography : Lessons Learned

As many of have you seen in my last few posts, I signed up for iSyndica and I reported back on the results of my submissions.  Now, I would like to share some feedback and tips I learned throughout the process. Some of the lessons that I learned seem like common sense to me now, but like Steven Wright has said, “Experience is something you don’t get until just after you need it”.

• Rejections : The various sites typically responded back with the reason being either that the photograph was out of focus, too noisy, or not unique enough for use as a stock image.
• Lessons Learned : While I typically shoot with the ISO as low as I can, I will be passing future submissions through Noise Ninja to be on the safe side as far as noise is concerned. Also, I will be viewing all photographs that I edit at 100% before finishing them.

• Workflow : I found that once all of the photographs were uploaded to the stock websites, I still had to go through and add Titles, Descriptions, and anywhere from 7-10 (minimum) keywords for each photograph.  These dramatically slowed down the process of submitting each photograph for approval on each website.
• Lesson Learned : By editing these attributes and including them as part of the workflow, they are embedded into each file and will auto-fill into the fields on each stock website.  This saves A TON of time and in most cases, all I will have to do in the future is to click the “submit for approval” button without the hassle of entering all of the information each time.

I have to say that this has been an invaluable experience.  Applying what I have learned as I move forward can only increase the likelihood that my future submissions will be accpeted and hopefully purchased on these stock websites.

As for my experience with trying out iSyndica, it has been wonderful. Being able to upload a batch of photographs once rather than fourteen times is an obvious time saver. I recommend it to anyone who shoots photographs for use in stock.

Results of My Submissions with iSyndica

After signing up (and completing the necessary applications) for the 14 stock websites listed below, I uploaded a batch ten images to each.  I was only able to use the iSyndica service for distributing the images to Crestock, Fotolia, Fotomind, MostPhotos, Pixmac, and YayMicro at the time of upload because I either did not have the required credentials for proper account linkage to iSyndica, or because my application to become a contributor was still in process for the remainder of the websites.

Here are the results:

• BigStockPhoto

1/10 images accepted

• CanStockPhoto

9/10 images accepted after initial approval of application

• Crestock

-/10 (all 10 images still under review)

• Fotolia

1/10 images accepted

• Fotomind

10/10 images accepted

• MostPhotos

10/10 images accepted

• MyStock

5/10 images accepted

• Pixmac

0/10 images accepted

• YayMicro

10/10 images accepted

• 123RF

-/10 (application is still under review as well as all 10 images that were submitted)

• Dreamstime

0 – Every time I tried to upload with iSyndica or via their site directly, it never worked.

• FeaturePics

7/10 images accepted (7 accepted and 3 images still pending review)

• StockXPert

0/5 – Rejected my application completely

• Zymmetrical

0/10 images accepted (3 denied and 7 images still under review)

I am very pleased with this initial round of submissions.  58% of the images that I have received feedback on were accepted.  While this number is not great, I did learn a lot from this experience.  I am in the process of compiling some tips that I would like to share in my next post about what I learned from the process as well as the feedback that I have received (particularly from the websites that rejected my submissions).  Stay tuned!

I would love to hear your feedback or any comments that you may have if you have tried this as well.