July 29th, 2010
At Bigstock, we encourage photographers to submit images with model releases and, if appropriate, property releases, so buyers have the flexibility to use the images in advertisements.
Sometimes, however, it makes more sense to submit an image as an editorial image—like the celebrity red carpet photo seen here. This post will help explain what those cases are.
Keep in mind our review team enforces quality standards on editorial images as they do on every image in the collection. Customers see a notice before they download editorial images letting them know there are usage restrictions on these images.
If you’re interested in starting to shoot editorial images, read these tips before you submit them to Bigstock. Good luck!
News events
Photos of something happening that’s of wide interest, such as a public speech, a press conference, or a natural disaster, are acceptable for submission to the Bigstock collection.
Sports
Photos of sports events and sports figures are usually acceptable as editorial images.
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Posted in Tips | 1 Comment »
July 19th, 2010
When you upload your images to Bigstock, make keywording an important part of your workflow. Your images will sell better if you put a little extra effort to writing accurate keywords, and lots of them.
Here are a few tips to help you master the art and science of keywording.
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Posted in Keywording | 3 Comments »
June 16th, 2010
As you know, we’ve been making some serious to improvements at Bigstock over the last several months. We’ve just rolled out a series of new contributor features, including charts and graphs to help you keep better track of your earnings.
In addition, we’re announcing the addition of a tax center to help our contributors submit the proper tax forms. We realize it’s not the most fun thing we’ve ever introduced, but it’s necessary to make sure we comply with tax laws in the U.S., where our company is based.
To learn more, visit the Bigstock Tax Center for answers to your questions.
Posted in Announcements, Legal | 1 Comment »
June 16th, 2010
If you sell stock images, you know how important—and rewarding—it can be to track your sales. Bigstock thinks our contributors deserve the best reporting tools, so we’ve just introduced some upgrades to help you track your sales. Here’s what’s new:
The Commissions Hover. When you’re logged in to Bigstock, just hover your mouse over the words “your account” on any page to see your latest statistics at a glance.
The Image Earnings Graph. Visit the “Your Account” section of Bigstock and track your earnings visually over time with our new graph showing your earnings per day. You can also export your earnings to a CSV file, so you can use this data in your own database or spreadsheet program such as Microsoft Excel.
The Image Statistics Table. Our image statistics table, also part of the “Your Account” section, gets a snazzy new interactive design. You’ll now see a thumbnail of each image when you hover over the image name. We’ve also introduced a series of new graphs that help you instantly visualize how well each of your images is performing. And as with the earnings graph, you can export this data as a CSV file.
Better data. We’re adjusting the way we count image views to exclude automated activity, such as spiders from search engines. We’ll be scrubbing all the archived data to make sure it’s consistent with this change. These new statistics will help give you a better idea of how many people are viewing your Bigstock images.
Use these tools to build the best-selling Bigstock portfolio you can, and maximize the earnings from your excellent creative work.
Posted in Announcements, Tips | 2 Comments »
June 5th, 2010
The Bigstock team is packing our bags and getting ready for the HOW Design Conference, which starts Sunday in Denver. It’s one of the top events for creative professionals, and we’ll be there to spread the word about Bigstock.
If you’re attending the conference, visit booth 608 to learn more about us and pick up some free swag! We’ll also be at the HOW Stock Photography Expo on Sunday.
Monday night, don’t miss our happy hour at The Drink, with an open bar co-sponsored by Bigstock and our parent company, Shutterstock.
We can’t wait to see you in Denver!
Posted in Announcements, Events | No Comments »
May 21st, 2010
As many contributors know, downloads for specifically-themed images spike during certain times of the year. For example, Bigstock buyers are most likely going to be searching for summer-themed images during spring (or in some cases, even earlier).
When to upload particular seasonal or other “timing” based images is a popular question, and while there’s no clear cut answer, the good news is that we do have some tips you may find helpful.
Plan – and upload – ahead of time.
For holidays, a good rule of thumb is to plan about four to six months in advance and continue to upload until about a month before your target holiday, event, or season. Establish a calendar that shows national and international holidays.
In most cases, it’s a matter of “the earlier, the better.” As obvious as this sounds, do not underestimate the benefits of planning ahead. If you’re preparing winter holiday-themed images, for example, it doesn’t hurt to begin uploading them in June, July, or August. If you’re still doing so the week of Thanksgiving, that is probably too late.
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May 11th, 2010
Experienced stock photographers know to secure model and property releases when shooting recognizable people or locations. But there are some subjects which, for legal and intellectual property reasons, cannot be used in a commercial license without additional permission. For example, a crayon with a recognizable Crayola swirl may be covered by that company’s trademark.
Below, we’re publishing a list of many known trademark, copyright and intellectually property issues, compiled by our colleagues at Shutterstock. (Please note that this list is not all-inclusive.)
We are also taking steps to make sure every image in the Bigstock library is in compliance, which means some images we previously accepted are being pulled from the library. This is the right thing to do for our customers and for intellectual property holders, and it’s a way to make sure all our contributors are held to the same rules.
If you have any questions or see an image that’s an obvious violation of these rules, Contact Us. We’ll do our best to remove or re-tag these images that violate these guidelines.
Note: For the most current version of this list, please visit Shutterbuzz.
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Tags: Copyright, Intellectual Property, Trademark
Posted in Legal | 2 Comments »
May 4th, 2010
A lot of Bigstock contributors, smartly, keep an eye on their monthly earnings and look for sales trends. But sometimes there’s an exceptionally good or disappointing month and it’s hard to figure out why. Based on our experience, here are some ways to keep your images selling consistently well.
- For obvious reasons, upload as many quality images as possible. Your sales are likely to be more consistent if you have more images on Bigstock.
- Diversify. You’ll make sales when buyers are specifically looking for the topics you cover. The more variety of topics in your portfolio, the greater your chances of having a good month.
- Pay careful attention to your metadata. Include lots of high-quality, descriptive keywords. Labeling your images accurately will help the right image buyers find your images. Successful contributors often add as many as 30 or more relevant keywords to their images.
- Join us in marketing your images online. If you have a web site or a social media presence, use it to show off your portfolio and direct people to Bigstock. You can even build a lightbox of your images and share it using Twitter, Facebook or some other social media platform. (Related post: Putting Bigstock Lightboxes To Work For You.)
- Pay attention to the calendar, cultural trends and current events. Sales drop on holidays when offices are closed, but you might enjoy a burst of sales at certain times of the year if you upload seasonally appropriate or topical images.
Bigstock has also recently made improvements to help your sales:
- Our search engine is more accurate than it was before, with less “clumping” of similar images and higher-quality, more diverse results. There are also many different ways to browse images.
- Our new design improves the look and feel of the site to make the site easier for buyers to use.
- We’re actively marketing the collection to buyers through trade shows, online advertising, newsletters, blogs, social media, print ads and more.
Lastly, keep reading this blog for more tips on how to keep increasing the success of your Bigstock portfolio. We’re on Twitter and Facebook, too.
Tags: Keywords, Microstock, Photography, Sales, Tips
Posted in Tips | 3 Comments »
April 21st, 2010
If you’re like most photographers, you’d rather do photography than paperwork. That said, a little bit of paperwork is sometimes necessary. If you shoot stock photos, model and property releases are a vital part of your work. You’ll need releases if you want stock sites like Bigstock to accept your photos, and releases can protect you if there’s a legal question about one of your photos.
This post goes over some of the basics about releases. If you have questions that aren’t answered here, leave a comment at the end of this post or write to support@bigstock.com. We may address additional questions in a future post.
When does a photo need a model release?
All photos of recognizable people should have a model release. (Bigstock makes exceptions only for newsworthy images submitted for editorial usage; those images are labeled so buyers know they can’t be used commercially.)
When does a photo need a property release?
All images shot on private property, including the interiors of homes and businesses, should have a property release signed by the property owner. As with model releases, the sole exception is newsworthy editorial images.
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Tags: Model Releases, Stock Photography
Posted in Legal, Tips | 4 Comments »
April 12th, 2010
Today Adobe officially announced Creative Suite 5, which includes a major upgrade to Photoshop.
Will the upgrade be worth the money? Adobe has published a web site calling out new features, and some of them look quite impressive.
Here’s a look at five new features that stand out.
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Posted in Products | 1 Comment »
