April 2009

 
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concept increase in photo sales

The main thing to remember is that microstock is stock photography, it's not a place for the 'art of photography'. While artistic images might be accepted and sell in limited quantity these are probably not the best way to go if you want to make some good earnings. Likewise the photos that a lot of people praise either by word of mouth or in comments on a site like flickr do not necessarily make good microstock pictures; these often look pretty or have a wow factor, but usually lack a meaning or concept, this is a common mistake for most beginning photographers dipping their toe into the stock industry.


It's an incredible number to reach, and it's important to highlight that they are not all licensed for free use in commercial work, nor are they all of suitable resolution to use as stock images. Looking at flickr creative commons I can see that around 17.5 million images have a licence that would let anyone use them as stock (with attribution of course), the remainder have non-commercial licenses.


As a photographer you have probably come across the term geotagging before now, a way to describe the location a photo was taken in metadata embedded within an image file. This geo tagging can be done in camera (some cameras contain a GPS), with a companion device (a geotagger) that tracks your location as you take photos and synchronises later, or manually with software (just like when you embed titles, descriptions and keywords).

From a stock photography point of view, embedding the location coordinates in this way seems to have had little uptake, even though the technology has been around for some time. There are several reasons for this:


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