Stock Photography Software

So I just started delving into some stock photography software that should make selling photographs online a little bit easier.  One of the reasons I actually stopped uploading to some of the less profitable microstock sites is the large amount of time involved in uploading and keywording.  It stopped making sense to me to spend hours per week for a return of only a few dollars.

The first software for selling stock photography is called ProStockMaster.  The first awesome fact about this software is that it’s absolutely free.  It basically holds a library of all of your microstock agencies and will simultaneously upload your images to all of them!  Having once uploaded my images to nine different sites, I can tell you that this is really an amazing piece of software.

ProStockMaster allows you to enter one set of keywords and a description for each image, and then uses these for every site.  Again, having to add keywords to each image at each site is crushing.  There is a tool that helps you come up with more keywords by suggesting similar or related words to ones that you have already entered.  It also shows you your earnings for each site so that you don’t have to go look them up individually.

Next, I’d like to mention Photoshop since there is a way to save some time with keywording built into this software.  Once you are ready to save your photograph you can go “File info” under the file menu and enter a description and keywords for the image.  This information will then show up in the appropriate fields when you upload your images to stock sites.  This isn’t nearly as good as software that also uploads to all of your sites, but it has certainly helped me out quite a bit since I learned of it.

Another stock photography software much like ProStockMaster is called CushyStock.  I haven’t tried this particular software since there is a little note in red on the site stating that they have ceased support and development of the software.  I suppose that is a bad sign for the future of the company!  They still have the free version up and the are still selling the premium version.  I can’t imagine that anybody would willingly pay for software that is no longer supported or being developed, but you never know.  Anyway, like its competitor, it offers uploading to all of your microstock sites, keywording and description, and image sales stats.

Lastly, I would like to mention an online tool that I have used for greatly expanding my keyword list for each image.  Yuri Arcurs, who’s a pretty famous microstocker developed the tool.  You enter a basic keyword and then it will show you some similar images from either Shutterstock or Crestock.  You choose which images most closely resemble yours and it spits out a long list of keywords extracted from this images.  Try it and I bet you will like it. 🙂

Yuri Arcurs keywording tool

I hope that at least one of these stock photography software options will help you out in your quest to streamline the usually tedious microstock uploading process.