Stock Agents
Remember the days of labeling chromes and sending pages of VueAll’s to your stock agent? In the last decade things have changed, and they are changing again. We graduated from chromes to digital, allowing submissions on everything from CD’s and DVD’s to hard drives and FTP’s.

Some agents still insist on one of these technologies to meet their specifications, but mailing objects is expensive and precarious. Costly hard drives get lost and even broken. Many companies are now turning to proprietary upload systems that allow them to view high resolution imagery and receive the model releases and metadata all intact.

There seems to be little consistency among the upload sites, and some are much more reasonable to use than others. A quick review of four different systems will give you an idea of the demands and the variety of site designs. Be prepared to allot time to the effort, as each image requires specialized work. The micro sites seem to take the lead in this technology, as they do in many of the new site designs in the imaging industry.

They have a special “submit” website where you log in. Then you access a headline that offers you the ability to Upload, Manage, Submit, and to know what is Pending, Approved, or Declined. In the Upload section you have a choice of using an FTP or uploading one image at a time. Your embedded metadata and keywords are captured from the image, and you can upload as many images as you want. After the upload is complete, you will see the images under Manage, where you can modify the metadata and attached the releases that you have also uploaded. Under Manage, you are able to view ten of your images at one time, along with the caption, and keywords. Mousing over the image makes it easier to view instantly, and your original image number is retained, a luxury you don’t get on every site. There is a link for each image that connects to all of the model release numbers. If you mouse over the number you see the model or property release enlarged. You can choose the correct releases and click to attach them to the image. You can process as many images this way as you like, and then go to Submit to send off the images of your choice for review. Within a week you will get an email as to the accepted images, along with a detailed review of why some were not accepted. You can go online any time to see what’s Pending, Approved, or Declined. It’s a reasonably easy and efficient system in terms of time spent.

• Information needs to be completed or validated.
• File in queue
• Your file has been selected and added to the database
• This file is in the Free section
• Your file has been declined and/or deleted
• File refused from free section

A link for each image brings you to the metadata processing section, where your embedded captions and keywords will be displayed, or where you can add the same information independently. Then you have to add a Representative category and a Conceptual category with ‘pull downs’ that are time consuming and not always descriptive of your imagery. That is followed by another ‘pull down’ listing your model releases to attach. If you don’t recognize the release by name or number, you have to refresh to a completely different screen to find an image of your release. Conveniently you can hit “Submit and Finish,” or “Finish Later,” if you are not ready to stay with the process. This means you don’t lose all your work and information. You will be flipped back to the list of images to process with an icon on your image saying it’s in queue. It takes a week or two to receive separate emails for each image letting you know whether it’s accepted or not. The numbering system changes and you lose your own number, making it somewhat confusing to tell what was not accepted. All in all, it’s a pretty easy system, especially if you already have all your keywords embedded. The system only allows up to eight keywords, however. Best of all, when you license an image, you receive an email. You can go to My Credits to process the sale to your Paypal account.

You can only work with one image at a time, and as a non-exclusive artist, you start with a 15 image per week upload limit and can scale to 35 as a non-exclusive. That number goes up as high as 150 for highly popular exclusive artists. Once the image is online, you title it, describe it, and check off four boxes offering information about copyright, trademark and model releases. You have to add the keywords yourself, as the embedded words do not travel with the image. If they are unsure of a word you use, you have to specify the meaning via a detailed category of choices. This sounds laborious, but, as your images will be exposed to millions in more than 10 other languages, iStock wants to be clear that you mean “the color orange” or a “fruit,” so the image can be accurately keyworded in all other supported languages simultaneously, reaching a broad customer set. However, if you have made a mistake, like repeating a keyword, it will reject what you have done and you’ll have to start over again, as everything you have done to that point is gone. The next step is to attach the releases and hit Proceed. If there are multiple releases per each image, you have to use an image editor to combine them into one file. iStockphoto boasts some unique features that aid in editing and promotion of the images. One of their biggest assets in the submission process is the Controlled Vocabulary. It offers the “ability to allow contributors to keyword in their language of choice, but still be found by buyers using a different language.” Also their upload software handles a lot of “behind the scenes: checks and tasks” – “File size, file type, and color space are all vetted automatically by their software before the image ever gets into the inspection queue, so files won’t ever get rejected for being, for instance, CMYK instead of RGB.” Also very useful for clients is their Copy Space feature, which analyzes the image for space available for copy. All the sites have tutorials and FAQ’s to help, but offer little consistency among systems for ease of the learning curve.