Microstock Software and Services

Picworkflow is a microstock submission and analysis tool. It works a lot like the now closed isyndica service. If you never used isyndica then you should probably go and read the review of isyndica before continuing. All the key benefits of picworkflow and the major concerns are the same as those for isyndica.

Update: Microstock Charts is current down pending updates

MicrostockCharts.com is a free service that allows microstock contributors to record their monthly sales, downloads, sell through rate and the size of their portfolio. Users can then plot graphs of these statistics along with other values calculated from them (RPI, Return per download, total earnings and total downloads).

Plotting graphs of these values is common amongst microstock contributors. It allows you to more easily see things like how well your portfolio is growing, the effects of a change of image style you might have recently adopted, how much you can invest on taking a photo to break-even on average. etc.

Lookstat is a service that allows you to track sales of your microstock images across several websites.

Lookstat Has Closed, this review is for reference only

As an alternative we suggest you look at StockPerformer

Tracking your sales statistics is important, seeing what's selling and what's not selling is vital to success in microstock unless you enjoy spending time keywording, sorting and uploading images that earn less money than they cost to produce. You could track sales from each site you use yourself but it's difficult to compare how each image or collection of images are selling across all the sites you use. Some microstock contributors use spreadsheets to manually tabulate their sales each month.

The lookstat site currently tracks and correlates your sales data from three microstock agencies:

• istockphoto
• dreamstime
• shutterstock

Smugmug is a site which allows you to setup a portfolio of your images and if you opt for professional account you can sell the images as downloads via a commercial license direct to buyers, you keep 85% of the sale.

The real decision on using this site is the content of your photos.

Sites like this (photoshelter and many others) are great if you want to sell prints of fine art, abstract and landscape images, or event photography. These sales areas are off topic for microstockinsider.com, but probably not off topic for many of the readers who in work different image genres. If you are interested in selling such images then you might find an operator like smugmug very interesting. I would imagine that their site has a lot of visitors who are in the market to buy a print if they see something they like.

Embedding IPTC keywords and descriptions into your images is one of the biggest time saving tips I can give to any new micro-stock contributor. There are a lot of different software tools available. In this post I highlight a few different applications that you can use to add keywords to your images before you upload them.

Read more about IPTC keywords in "Indepth: IPTC and EXIF data"