With our new design, our goal was to make it simpler and faster for artists to contribute their images to Bigstock. For our contributors, we made significant enhancements to the Bigstock upload process. You can now make all your edits on a single screen. Our new interface features real-time metadata field validation and direct image submission from multiple editing steps.

We’re continuing to make improvements as we go and it’s likely that we’ll make a few refinements in the coming weeks and months.  In the meanwhile, here are a few tips to help you make the most of the uploading process.

1. The basics.

If you’re logged into the site, your main upload page is here. This is the nerve center of your Bigstock uploads. You can upload images directly through your web browser (up to 10 at a time) or using FTP (hostname: ftp.bigstockphoto.com, Username: your Bigstock username, Password: your Bigstock password).

If you’re uploading model releases, it’s best to do that first. Use the Release Manager, not the FTP site.

Once your images are uploaded, you can view them in the “Edit and Submit” area of Uploads in Your Account.

2. Editing a single image.

As always, be sure each image is labeled with an accurate title, description, keywords, categories, releases and licensing information before submitting it for review. On the new site, you enter this data in a floating window with a series of tabs at the top. Enter the data for each field and proceed to the next tab. You can hop from tab to tab if you want to go back and change something.

If you upload image files that include IPTC metadata, that data is imported into our system automatically. You won’t see it in the floating “Edit images” window when you’re doing a batch edit, but it’s there.

3. Batch image edits.

Bigstock veterans know that batch edits are the faster way to do things if you’ve uploaded several similar images and want to edit them all at once. On the “Edit and Submit Images” page, you can select multiple images to modify at once. Use the “All,” “Completed” or “None” shortcuts to quickly select a batch images. Or, use these mouse and keyboard combinations to edit a custom selection of images:

• CLICK – Selects one image.
• SHIFT-CLICK – Selects a row of images in a range (just click on the first image and the last image in the range).
• CTRL – CLICK (or COMMAND-CLICK) – Select or deselect images one by one.

You’ll know you’ve selected an image when a blue border lights up around it.

4. Modifying some, but not all, fields in batch edits.

We’ve made an important enhancement to our batch editing. If you leave a field blank while doing a batch edit, it won’t overwrite any existing data. For example, if you just want to assign keywords to images, but leave titles alone, you can do that.

The same goes for model/property releases and custom licensing settings: Leave it blank and your existing settings will be preserved; make a change and the change will apply to all images in the batch you’re editing, overwriting their existing settings.

Keep in mind that in batch mode, changes to a field will replace the metadata for that field, not add to the existing metadata in that field.

5. Managing your Special License preferences.

If you opted in to Special Licensing, you’ve already set up your default Special Licensing Options. Images you upload will always inherit your Special License selections. Your Special License options will show up when you’re editing a single image. However, in in batch editing mode, your Special License selections will not appear. They’re considered an empty field, since batch edits are only applying changes.

6. Submitting your images.

Once you’ve added metadata, you can submit images from the individual editing page, the thumbnail page, or the batch editing page. If you’ve started entering metadata but are not ready to submit your images yet, that’s fine; you can click “save changes” and return later.

If you submit an image from an individual editing page, you can simply click “save and submit” [for approval]. If you’re editing a series of single images, you’ll be automatically advanced to the next image.