Any Stock photography contributor will know only too well what really happens between taking the photograph and finally uploading it to stock agencies. There is an exciting, creative, sometimes almost addictive — side to seeing your work appear on platforms like Getty, Adobe Stock, Pond5 and Shutterstock. But very few people ever see the journey behind it.
The shoot itself is only one part of the process.
What happens afterwards can be frustrating, repetitive, mentally exhausting and, at times, surprisingly unrewarding. Over the last eighteen months, much of our focus has been on trying to change that — building and refining a system shaped by real contributor experience, designed to absorb years of workflow knowledge and remove some of the most tedious parts of stock photography submission.
This is part of that journey.
Raw Reality: From Pouch to Platform
We were excited before we had even left the house.
It had been months since our last visit to Manor Wildlife Park — not since November 2025 — and this trip felt different.
The last we visited, the three tiger cubs had only just been born. We had photographed and filmed them during those early days, sent the images and footage to Anna Ryder Richardson as agreed, then uploaded the content across Shutterstock, Adobe Stock, iStock, Pond5, and other stock agencies.
What happened afterwards genuinely surprised us.
At the time, SpeedData Pro was still evolving through real-world contributor testing. Those tiger cub uploads — following earlier lion shoots at Folly Farm — quietly became part of the refinement process itself — helping shape metadata structure, keyword ordering, platform-specific formatting and additional feature development through actual submission experience.
Some of those images quickly began appearing prominently across stock platform searches and front pages. For the first time, it felt as though the metadata was finally working with us rather than against us.
Out of 18K male lion videos on Getty Istock we are currently on page 1, position 2 for ‘lion’ in the search with ‘most relevant’ ticked and 6th with ‘most popular’ ticked and another 5 of our videos making the first page.
Out of 96K Lion Videos on Shutterstock our first lion video is showing at page 1 position 36 when sorted by ‘popular’
Adobestock we are featuring on page 1 for our tiger cubs both for relevance (6th position) and most downloads (25th position)
And ….. we started selling – so naturally, we wanted to go back and get some more material.
The tiger cubs would be older now. More adventurous. More confident. More unpredictable.
Perfect.
Or so we thought.
When we arrived at the entrance, the lady on the gate smiled apologetically and explained the cubs were temporarily inside while the keepers cleaned the pond area.
Absolutely GUTTED
Then she added:
“There are a lot of joeys around though…”
That single sentence changed the entire day.
Normally we would have headed straight for the tigers, but instead we wandered into the wallaby walkthrough — an area we had oddly overlooked in previous visits. For some reason, wallabies had never really inspired us photographically before.
But as you probably know ….. babies always change things.