How to save time selling your stock photos

Last updated: Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

Have you considered selling your images on microstock? Are you afraid of the amount of time it could take? Startup iSyndica is moving fast to reduce the burden of selling your images online. Microstock Diaries named it “The Ultimate Microstock Utility”.

The company, co-founded by early Vistaprint employees, has created an online platform that lets photographers easily submit their content to several stock agencies. The tagline Upload Once, Sell Everywhere™ summarizes the core feature of iSyndica: The ability to submit your images to over 20 microstock photo agencies in minutes, if not seconds. How does it work?

Your workflow with iSyndica can be broken down in 5 steps: Configure, Upload, Distribute, Promote & Track. Configuring is by far the most time consuming step, but it only needs to be done once. This step involves providing your credentials for each stock agency you submit your photos to. You can also sign up for new ones, given that you proceed through the approval process. They also support social sites such as Facebook, Flickr and Picasa making it an all-around distribution platform.

The second step, uploading, can currently be done in two ways: direct FTP uploads, or using a webform. Uploaded images are stored on iSyndica’s system for a period of 30 days giving you enough time to distribute them everywhere. The IPTC and EXIF metadata are extracted to enable you to edit any descriptions or keywords before submission. One would wish that keywords would be submitted to all agencies, but the industry hasn’t yet worked together to define submission standards, so some may require you to submit your keywords again.

iSyndica’s syndication screen

Distributing is by far the easiest part and the real strength of the system.

The “Syndicate” screen shows you which stock photo agencies your images have been distributed to. A simple click will distribute your image to an agency. If you are distributing 50 photos to 5 agencies, each 20MB in size, it can be a real time-saver. Some of the agencies supported include Dreamstime, Fotolia and Veer. Shutterstock isn’t officially supported but using the “Generic FTP connector” allows you to distribute your photography to them.

iSyndica Watermark Promotion, a relatively new feature, will be of interest to many. For channels such as Facebook and Flickr, you have the ability to distribute your photos with a watermark automatically added. This will save you time, removing the need to manage two sets of photos or to manually watermark your images. One can expect this feature to be further improved as iSyndica becomes more popular.

Finally, selling your images on many sites makes it difficult to track your revenue. This is addressed in the fifth step of the workflow: tracking. iSyndica has created a simple but effective reporting feature that displays your earnings by channels. Alternatively you can also choose to view the same graph for the number of sales. This will satisfy anyone’s cravings for numbers and charts.

Best of all, iSyndica is a free service and will let you distribute up to 100 images a month. However, some users may wish to store their portfolio on iSyndica. Others might find the image limit too small. For those cases, you will have to pay. There are 4 plans, from $4.99 to $39.99/month, which will let you store up to 140GB and access additional features. For those who just need to distribute more images, you can purchase pay-as you go credits for 1 cent/credit. To put things in perspective, sending an image to 10 microstock agencies will cost 10 credits. Simplify your uploads today and sign up now

Try iSyndica today. It’s free. Interested in a subscription? iSyndica is giving a coupon for a PLUS subscription for $1 for 1 month. Coupon code: DPHOTOJOURNAL .