Metadata – Outsourcing

I love shooting, I love getting my images in the computer & adjusting them, giving them just the right “look” I’m trying to achieve. Now comes the hard part, adding metadata: keywords, description, title, dealing with releases & uploading. Ugh! I found I spent way, way too much time dealing with metadata & uploading.

I cannot tell you how frustrating it is after hours & hours of adding metadata & uploading images only to find out the next morning there was an error in the uploading or the releases did not upload correctly, try again.

Take if from me, look at all the big stock photographers out there, how do you think they got to be so successful? By being a “jack of all trades”, no, they know what they do best & focus their energy on that, shooting. They let others do what they do best, rather its keywording, accounting, or styling. That’s how you grow a business, you cannot be a “jack of all trades” and grow your business.

Well, I’ve got a great accountant & I hire a great stylist as I need one. So I wised up & starting sending my images to LookStat – they add all the metadata, keywords & descriptions. LookStat handles the releases & then uploads the images & releases to my agency, istockphoto. If you use more than one agency they can upload to multiple agencies as well. It’s so easy, I shoot, adjust my images then send the images to LooksStat via ftp. Done.

LookStat is simply an extension of my business, I focus on shooting & they do the rest.