Confined to the office today while waiting for the next cyclone to hit, I decided to update some images on one of my commercial websites. Browsing various microstock sites, I was struck by the variation of image quality and lack of creative content.

I decided to update some of the images on one of my commercial websites, as they no longer represented the message I was trying to convey, and set about trawling the microstock web for replacements.

Free Microstock

I started by searching around some of the free microstock sites such as  Stock.Xchng, Stock Vault, and Dreamstime Free Stock.

There were a couple of good images in the free stock collections, but in most cases the variety of images is small and the quality is pretty poor.

I also came across the EverystockPhoto website, which interestingly collects photos from a number of sources, including indexing Flickr images. A couple of things surprised me:-

• The images from Flickr seem to be based on Creative Commons licenses. Depending on your privacy/usage selection in Flickr, it is possible images of your friends, family or even last year’s Christmas party could appear on this site for others to use.
• The site is caching the Flickr images. Clicking on a few of the images Flickr links, the browser goes to the Flickr site and says either the image has been deleted, or the user no longer exists. The worry here is that you may have thought deleting your image from your Flickr account gets rid of it, but in fact it can still exist on this and other sites…. (As a Flickr user, I am not sure I am comfortable with this.)
• The site uses an Attribution License System, but I wonder how many users would actually attribute the image to a photographer on their site, or in a document. It reminds me of the recent case where a leading newspaper used a Photographers image without consent.

Paid Microstock

Unable to find any satisfactory free images, I started browsing paid microstock sites such as iStockphoto, Shutterstock, etc.

It was an interesting experience being a buyer looking for particular images to illustrate a concept. Having a photography background and a particular requirement in mind, you tend to be quite harsh in critiquing others work. Thinking about how you could improve others images is an excellent learning experience on how to improve your own photography.

The image quality on the microstock sites seemed to fall into 3 categories:- professional, quite good, and poor….. and there were a lot of poor quality images.

The professional quality images really stood out, but I was surprised that many of them had just been thrown together without much thought put into layout and construction. E.g. I was searching for an image similar to that above, but could not find any from the 2000+ search results on iStockphoto, that contained a computer keyboard and notepad shot from a low angle. Many of the keyboard images were taken from a position directly above, and lacked any creative thought.  In several cases it appears the photographer has moved the elements around to make multiple images, but has not thought about composition or making a good image.

While digging around, I also found a number of images that would be useful for my elearning courses. With elearning taking off, the market for learning and web content will continue to expand, and in turn increase the requirement for quality microstock images.

In Summary

With free microstock images you generally get what you pay for. The selection is limited and the quality is not that great.

Paid microstock images are a viable solution for professional looking images for use in websites and eLearning courses, however the image quality and creativeness can vary widely.

As a photographer, putting yourself into the position of a buyer can be an excellent educational experience. It gives you a chance to critique others images and determine how you could do better, while analysing collections for niche gaps that provide possible business opportunities.

I learned quite a bit from being a buyer today, and in future am going to put more thought into the composition of my images.

1.  Microstock Newsletter

I have been a subscriber to Lee Torens newsletter from Microstock Diaries for a  few months, and there is quite a bit of useful information when you dig around the site. I find the regular updates on how Lee’s stock is selling across different sites interesting.

2.  Tracking spreadsheet

I was getting a bit confused over which images I had submitted as the number of images built up, and found it useful to build a excel spreadsheet to keep track of it. (I looked for a field in Lightroom that could help with this, but could not find anything.)

Some stock sites delete images if they have been rejected, so it is hard to determine what has not been submitted or rejected. In the spreadsheet, I can track what has been submitted, accepted, and rejected.

I also have a couple of columns where I can record images statistics from sites such as flickr. This helps give me an idea of what images are popular.

3.  Image Rejection

I can also record the reason for each image rejection in the spreadsheet. Over time this gives you a picture of trends as to what sort of images a particular stock agency is interested in. (e.g some agencies do not like the film grain in my high resolution slide scans, but others like the scans for their large size.)

Each stock agency is trying to cater to particular customers requirements, and an image that fulfills the requirements on one site will not necessarily fulfill the requirements of another.  The classic rejection comments are “not aesthetically acceptable” or “no business value”. In other words, there is technically nothing wrong, but they just don’t like your image. Unfortunately, this can also be down to the individual reviewer (…reminds me of English literature at school).

I try not to get too stressed over such comments because I know the image in question is selling on another site….

4. Submission Notification

Some stock sites send you an email notification when images have been processed with details of acceptance or rejection, and some sites do not. For those that do not send notification, the spreadsheet becomes more important. Reviewing it regularly will remind you to check the status of submitted images.

5.  FTP Upload

Most major sites allow you to upload images by FTP. If you have several images to upload, using FTP can make the workflow a bit smoother than uploading one image at a time.

6.  iSyndica Upload

Even FTPing can take time when you have several sites. I recently came across the iSyndica website, which makes your uploading really easy. Upload your images, video or illustrations  to iSyndica and they will store them and syndicate them out to the individual stock agencies to which you belong.

Best of all it is FREE to try out.

They have also just recently added connections to facebook, flickr so you can also upload images to the social websites directly from iSyndica.

7.  Keywording

Keywords are really important in stock photography if you want people to find your images. Each stock agency seems to have their own approach to keywording formats.

• Some sites allow multi-word keywords in commas: – e.g  reef, coral reef, fish
• Some sites do not use commas and allow multi-keywords in exclamation marks:- eg. reef  “coral reef” fish
• Some sites only allow single words, taking multi-word keywords  and stripping them down and delete duplicates: – eg. reef, coral, fish

There are also differences between sites for minimum numbers of keywords. Some sites require a minimum of 5 keywords, some 7 and some 10. Naturally the more accurate keywords you can use to describe a picture the more chance it has of being found.

Unfortunately there is no way around this, and you just have to deal with each sites requirements.

Conclusion

In these days where every dollars counts, it is worth keeping track of each submitted image, and treating your stock submissions as the business that they are. Attention to detail is important.

I hope these tips have been helpful. Let me know if you have any others…..

I can understand that different agencies are looking for different picture styles, but some quality comments leave me totally bamboozled, including:-

• An image is rejected because of “Limited commercial value due to composition”, when the same image is listed with three other stock agencies and has sold multiple times.
• An image is rejected for being “soft” at one agency, but accepted by two other agencies.
• Cases where one reviewer will reject an image for something like too much shadow or noise, but another reviewer at the same agency will approve it.
• An image is rejected for colour cast, when the slight cast is part of the image design.

I guess it comes back to the old adage that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and everyone sees something different in an image.

This is an interesting lessen in personnel taste, and shows how futile it is to try and  design an image that suits everyone.