A Stock Photo Contributor needs a whole lot more than Keywords
Ask anyone who regularly submits photographs to stock agencies where the time goes, they will tell you that taking the photograph is often only a small part of the process.
Time before the stock photo shoot
There is the research that is required before taking the photo, assessing the market, checking what is selling, assessing what is over-represented on stock photo site.
The specific location for the photo shoot, what specific opportunities are there, is the location familiar to you, are you going on a visit to a new location with limited time?
If you prefer to have a stock photo brief then all these things must be thought about and planned for.
The Stock Photo Shoot Itself
Probably the most enjoyable part, of course, but is never simply pointing the camera and clicking. Lenses, tripods, memory sticks, general equipment, composing the shot, waiting for the moment, waiting for the required action, or lack of it. Checking if the shot has been captured.
AFTER THE SHOOT – REVIEWING YOUR IMAGES
There’s nothing like getting back after a shoot and seeing what you have captured. Sometimes it is disappointing but when you get what you want its the best feeling in the world.
So much to do – but let’s cut through all that work for now, there are apps and resources we are currently developing which will be able to support you with various aspects of the ‘before‘ ‘during‘ and ‘shortly after” the photo shoot which we will be presenting in due course.
For this post – lets JUMP to the point where the shots have been taken, edited and are ready for the stock agency.
The point where the hard work is finished?
Well unfortunately even then there is a significant amount of work to do before an image can ever reach a buyer’s eyes on sites like Shutterstock or Pond5.
There is metadata to prepare, stock photo keywords to consider, descriptions to write, categories to select, agency rules and requirements to check and, eventually, all of that information has to make its way with the image onto the stock photo platform in a form that can finally be reviewed by the quality control gatekeepers at Adobe Stock, Alamy or similar photo agencies.
An aside: personally, I think Alamy are the one stock photo agency that have this pretty much spot on.
They pass or fail your batches of stock images before you do any of the metadata work, so there is less time wasted.
Once accepted, the onus is on the Alamy Contributor to make sure the legal requirements are attended to and that the metadata is good enough for the images to be found in search results.
Until you do that necessary work, the images may be accepted, but they aren’t on sale.
The downside is that if one image fails quality control, the whole batch fails.
Doing the post upload work for a handful of photographs does not seem particularly troublesome.
Doing it for a batch of 20+ images across several stock agencies and it becomes a workload.
That distinction is important because many AI photo metadata tools and ai chat agents can look at a photograph and generate pretty good quality descriptions or a list of keywords. That can be very useful, but generating words is only one part of preparing a stock photo for submission and there is little point repeatedly typing long prompts and instructions each time for every photograph. You are just spending the same time writing instructions, counting characters and keywords instead of doing what you did manually before.
SpeedData Pro was developed around the WHOLE job a stock photo contributor actually has to do and didn’t stop at half the task.
It doesn’t begin with the assumption that every photograph needs a title, description and some keywords and that the job is then finished.
It looks at the journey from several viewpoints
PREVENTION OF REJECTION / IMAGE SCREENING
- basic checks that would cause the image to fail review (quality standards, size requirements) differing platform’s minimum standards.
- the content type of the image, whether it is creative or editorial,
CONTRIBUTORS MINDSET / TOPIC RELEVANCE
- The photograph doesn’t always tell the whole story. The contributor may know why an image was created, the concept it is intended to illustrate, or important information about the subject that cannot reliably be determined from the image alone. That stock contributor knowledge can be important when preparing relevant metadata.
STOCK AGENCY’S REQUIREMENTS
- the stock photo agency it is writing metadata for, taking into account their specific rules and preferences for the fields being submitted
- ensuring results can easily be reviewed by the photographer
- ensuring results are stored so that they can transfer and be assimilated into the stock photo contributors dashboard for submission
That is where SpeedData Pro starts to become rather different from simply asking AI to keyword a photograph.
Commercial or Editorial?
Important differences
One of the most important decisions a stock photo contributor can make about an image happens before the keywords are written:
Is this photograph suitable for commercial submission, or should it be editorial?
That isn’t simply a different label attached to the same metadata.
Editorial stock photography has its own requirements. Dates and locations matter a great deal. Captions need to be constructed appropriately. recognizable people, property and other elements in a photograph can affect how an image should be submitted.
SpeedData Pro therefore supports both commercial and editorial workflows rather than treating every photograph as though it belongs in the same submission process.
We also built Editorial Rescue into the workflow.
If screening identifies an issue that may make an image unsuitable for the intended commercial submission, the contributor can review it and, where appropriate, move it into an editorial workflow instead of simply abandoning the photograph or starting the metadata process again.
The photographer remains responsible for that decision.
The software is there to help identify the issue and provide the appropriate workflow once that decision has been made.
For contributors who shoot real places, events, streets, businesses, travel, people and everyday life, that distinction can be extremely useful.
We will be publishing a whole edition of Metadata Matters on Creative and Editorial Content
One Stock Photo.
4 Stock Photo Agencies. 4 Different Requirements.
There is another problem familiar to anyone submitting the same work to more than one stock library:
Stock agencies don’t all work in exactly the same way.
A photograph may be the same photograph whether you’re looking at it on your computer or submitting it to Adobe Stock, Shutterstock, Getty/iStock or Pond5.
The submission requirements surrounding it aren’t necessarily the same.
Different agencies can have different expectations around descriptions, titles, categories, editorial information and the way metadata is ultimately delivered.
That means there is an important difference between:
generating metadata for a photograph
and
preparing that photograph for several stock agencies.
SpeedData Pro was built around the second problem.
A contributor can prepare an image for one supported agency or select all four. SpeedData then generates the appropriate metadata for each selected destination within the same workflow — with no additional credit charge for selecting multiple agencies.
You’re not simply creating one generic set of words and being left to work out what needs changing afterwards.
The aim is to reduce the repetitive work involved in taking the same batch of photographs through several different submission processes.
Categories Are Metadata Too
Keywords receive an enormous amount of attention in stock photography — understandably so.
They’re one of the principal ways buyers discover photographs.
But keywords aren’t the whole submission.
Where a stock agency requires categories, somebody still has to decide where the photograph belongs.
When you’re dealing with a substantial batch, category selection becomes another repetitive decision sitting between the finished photograph and the completed submission.
It is also a pretty important one, Choose the wrong category and you risk reducing the photograph’s visibility in relevant browsing and discovery. This is made even more complicated by having detailed category definitions for overlapping subjects and definitions that differ from one agency to another.
SpeedData Pro includes category selection where the destination agency requires it.
SpeedData Pro selects a category for each image only by matching the content of the image with the prescribed agency definitions every time it processes a new image.
All those small jobs add up. Rush them and you risk reducing the visibility of an image; do them properly and they can consume a great deal of contributor time.
Optional Safeguards: More Help If You Want It
There isn’t much point spending time creating beautiful metadata for an image that will most likely be rejected.
That’s why SpeedData’s workflow can begin with optional image screening.
Depending on the safeguards the contributor chooses to use, SpeedData can look for potential issues including not making minimum requirements for size and resolution, focus, exposure and contrast, as well as considerations involving people or property that may affect the intended submission.
It isn’t attempting to replace the photographer’s judgement or decide whether a photograph is good art.
That’s not its job.
The purpose is much more practical: flag something worth looking at before you spend the rest of the workflow preparing the image for submission.
These can be very helpful safety checks for someone newer to stock photography.
An experienced contributor will be well aware of the rules and limits, so will opt to turn off safeguards.
We deliberately wanted both approaches to be possible.
The Photographer Still Gets the Final Say
Automation becomes less useful if it removes the person who knows the photograph best.
SpeedData doesn’t generate the metadata and immediately fire it off to an agency.
It stops. It presents the results in an easily readable form.
The results can be reviewed before export, including the ranked keyword list.
That gives the contributor an opportunity to question something.
Remove a keyword.
Change one, add another.
Notice something the AI hasn’t understood.
Or decide that a suggestion further down the list is actually important to the photograph and should be ranked higher.
AI can analyse what it can see, but the photographer may know things the system doesn’t.
You may know that an apparently sensible keyword gives the wrong impression.
Human judgement isn’t removed from the workflow. It is deliberately left in it.
The repetitive work can be automated without pretending the photographer has nothing useful left to contribute.
Getting your Metadata Results onto the Stock Photo Platforms
This is another area that can easily be overlooked when talking about AI metadata.
Generating good metadata on a screen is not the end of a stock contributor’s job.
Eventually, that information has to reach the agency with your images.
If you’re submitting a batch of photographs, manually copying titles, descriptions and keyword lists from one application into another rather defeats the purpose of automating the earlier stages.
SpeedData therefore produces platform-ready, platform-specific CSV exports for its supported stock agencies. Not all agencies have the same fields or field names. Therefore you can export all Shutterstock images together and another platform in a different export. Then when you upload your batch of images to that platform you also upload and apply the relevant CSV file and watch your upload change from requires attention to ready for submission.
The export stage is part of the workflow, not an afterthought.
The objective is to take the contributor as far as sensibly possible from:
“Here are my photographs.”
to:
“Here is my reviewed metadata, prepared for the stock agency I’m submitting to.”
The agency submission itself remains the contributor’s.
SpeedData’s job is to make everything leading up to it considerably less repetitive.
Built Around the Contributor, Not Just the Photograph
Perhaps that’s the easiest way to explain what we were trying to achieve when we built SpeedData Pro.
We didn’t want to build an application that simply looked at a photograph and demonstrated how cleverly AI could describe it.
There are already plenty of ways to ask artificial intelligence what it sees in an image.
We wanted to look at the process from the other direction:
What does the stock contributor actually have to do and what admin burdens can we remove?
That means thinking about commercial and editorial submission.
It means thinking about different stock agencies.
It means categories as well as keywords.
It means screening before wasting time on an unsuitable submission.
It means giving the photographer an opportunity to review what the AI has produced.
And it means thinking about how the finished metadata gets out of the software and into a real stock photography workflow.
SpeedData Pro won’t take the photographs for you.
It won’t decide whether an image deserves a place in your portfolio.
And it doesn’t remove the photographer from the decisions that matter.
What it can do is take a substantial amount of repetitive work that happens after you’ve pressed the shutter and make that part of stock photography considerably quicker.
ALL THAT WORK DONE FOR YOU
While you relax and chat – SpeedData Pro is on fire taking care of the rest
Want to See Exactly What SpeedData Pro Does?
We’ve deliberately kept the detailed feature list on the dedicated SpeedData Pro website, where it can stay up to date as the application develops.
There you can explore the complete feature set, supported workflows and current stock agency integrations.
Explore SpeedData Pro Features
And if you’d rather judge it using your own photographs, you can.
SpeedData Pro currently gives you 5 free credits with no sign-up required. Once those have been used, you can sign in using your email and receive a further 30 free credits.
No carefully selected demonstration image required.
Try one of yours!
If you have questions about credits, agencies, workflows or how the application works, you’ll also find answers in the SpeedData Pro FAQ or you can email us direct at support@ai-photography-tools.com
Because ultimately, we’d rather you decide whether SpeedData belongs in your stock photography workflow by actually using it yourself.