Author: Amos Struck

Any microstocker with more than a few days in the industry knows the name Yuri Arcurs, as one of the most famously successful stock photographer turned entrepreneur, owner of his own brand and even his own stock photo agency, People Images. Dedicating the past year to renovating his studio, his blog and his social media presence, Yuri is now finally back, and better than ever! His new installations, new crew and impressive metrics are a testament to his success in the industry, and a great example of how a photographer can scale up their business straight to the top. Curious to…

Not so long ago a microstock contributor could do nothing but cope with the tedious task of keywording their images to submit them to stock photo agencies. Now, you not only have a keywording software, but an artificially intelligent one, none the least! Qhero, iStock-endorsed workflow assistant freeware, is now the first keywording tool based on Artificial Intelligence. In its latest update, the robust image uploader software has added top technology from image recognition expert Imagga to deliver an intelligent, automatic keywording function that adds relevant keywords to your file based in the analysis of its content. A great and modern way…

Just a couple weeks after the end of the year, MicroStockGroup is officially opening their 9th Annual Independent Microstock Survey 2016, collecting sales and portfolio stats from microstock contributors all over the world. The more photographers participate with their anonymous data, the more complete and comprehensive the results will be. And so it’s very important that you take part in the survey, regardless of how much you sell, how big your portfolio is, or how much time and resources you commit to your microstock business. The last survey for 2015/2016 was launched last May, and its final results and conclusions will…

Some weeks ago it was the 2016 edition of Photokina, the largest Trade Show in imagery industry that takes place in Cologne, Germany. As always, I was one of the attendants. This event convokes the biggest and more relevant companies in the stock photo industry. One of them is Adobe, whom held a press conference at the convention. .They dedicated time to Adobe Stock, their young stock photo and video integration for Adobe Creative Cloud, and two of Adobe Stock’s execs, –including Zeke Koch, whom I also interviewed for Stock Photo Press as you can see here– plus a top contributor,…

Keywording is a very crucial part of your workflow as a contributor selling stock photos via agencies. And there’s a team of developers whom know it. Stock photographer Ana Flasker and programmer Robert Jung, the guys behind Dropstock.io, are now out with Keyword.io: a new, free keywording tool  that hopes to make the process of selecting and adding keywords to your images easier and better. Using a base of over 30 million stock photos and sales metrics from different stock photo agencies, Keyword.io lets you search and select keywords for any concept or topic, sorting them by accuracy, popularity and…

EyeEm, a mobile photo sharing platform with integrated stock marketplace, has announced today a new partnership between them and Adobe Stock, Adobe’s stock photo service for designers that is fully integrated into Creative Cloud and its applications. Through this team-up, a curated selection of images from EyeEm’s library will be added to Adobe Stock’s recently launched Premium Collection, which features high-value images for professional advertisers and publishers. Like this, EyeEm adds a new potential revenue stream for their contributors, whom now get the opportunity to expose and sell their images to Adobe Creative Cloud’s millions of users. EyeEm in Adobe…

Good news for all those who wanted to contribute to Adobe Stock directly! Adobe has just launched today the public beta for their new Adobe Stock Contributor Site, where you’ll be able to upload still images and videos to be sold on Adobe Stock platform. The new site lets is fully integrated to Creative Cloud, and makes it easier and faster for you to submit photos, vectors, illustrations and videos, publishing them directly from Lightroom CC. This also adds valuable technologic improvement, like intelligent keywording and support for the latest cameras’ files. Until now Adobe Stock’s library was sourced from Fotolia — following…

Stock contributor assistant tool Stock Performer has added new features to their service. First they included a function to measure your Ranking and Performance in stock industry against all other contributors, and now they’ve introduced a new system to calculate Collection Cost, Profit and Loss. These functions add business analysis power to the already advanced service to track your sales in stock industry. Collecting anonymized data from users, the new Ranking and Performance function lets you know where you’re standing in business compared to your competition. And the new Collection Costs, Profits and Loss feature provides you with a way to…

PicsaStock has started to send out notification to their contributors about the upcoming shutdown of their online platform next week. Details are not yet disclosed, but they company is informing the inminent closure, as well as promising further information over how to cash out your pending earnings with them. Closing on Mid-August, PicsaStock is No Longer Selling Licenses The email sent out by company staff to contributors lets them know PicsaStock platform will be shutting down next Friday, August 19th. It also explains that as of now, PicsaStock is no longer selling licenses to any of the images on their…

MicroStockGroup has launched their annual independent microstock survey for 2015.  Last year they run the survey in January and included some “thank-yous” in the form of a random draw for give-aways. Read more about 2014 survey here. Founded by Tyler Olson, MicroStockGroup has been doing this annual survey since 2008, collecting data from microstock contributors to deliver stats and conclusions about the performance and development of microstock industry. Take Part in the Microstock Survey and Benefit from Collective Results Completing the survey takes only 5-10 minutes of your time, and all information is collected and displayed in a completely anonymous way.…