How to use Stock Submitter for video
One of the many issues with uploading videos to stock agencies (apart from the sheer size of the files) is the lack of an ability to automatically keyword and describe the files before uploading them. That generally means you need to visit each agency and either upload a csv file with that required information or do a lot of copy and pasting to get each video file ready for submission. On my recent trip to Hawaii I took 31 videos – keeping my promise to myself to start to focus more on this side of stock. Some are straight 4K shots, some timelapses and quite a number are Point of View (POV) GoPro shots taken from the front of the rental car as we were driving the narrow roads on Maui.
The road to Hana on Maui
The roads (especially once you pass Hana in the deep south of the island and continue around the base of the volcano) are quite narrow with some great shots of the sea as you hopethat another car isn’t coming towards you! Luckily, this part of the island is pretty remote and not that many people attempt the drive although the locals can travel pretty quickly along the road!
Anyway, back to the main point of this post! I decided to work on all my images first, processing and then keywording them. I could then use the same basic keywords and descriptions when it came to preparing my videos. I export all the videos into a specific folder ready for upload and so it is a simple matter to open that folder in Stock Submitter. The program automatically imports each video and creates a small Jpeg as a reference image so that you can see what the video is about.
Here you can see the files – the first set already have keywords and descriptions. The later ones with an orange border are awaiting descriptions. Basically, I select a group of similar videos (for instance the driving ones) and copy in my keywords from a similar still photo and then add a suitable title and description. This is applied to all the selected videos. I can then go to the Advanced Editor as I described in my earlier post to put the most important keywords first for Adobe Stock. As I don’t submit videos to iStock, there is no need to use their controlled vocabulary. The program has a neat feature that allows you to edit multiple files at once – even if they don’t have all the same keywords. So you can sort the order of the important ones and it only applies that change if the keyword in question is actually in each of the files. If it isn’t, the change is ignored for that file. That makes working on reasonably similar images much faster as you don’t have to visit each one in turn.
What you can also do is set the pricing for both 4K and HD clips for Pond5. This agency allows you to specify your own pricing and you do this by selecting a HD clip, clicking on Other Parameters and selecting Pricing Configuration and entering the price you want (select Remember to apply it to future HD clips.)
You can repeat this for a 4K clip to set and remember the pricing you want to use for your 4K videos on Pond5.
After a check to make sure the categories have been guessed appropriately, you can just select the videos you want to upload, select the agencies and then basically leave it to do its stuff. My first batch of 8 videos which included seven 4K videos ended up being a total size of 12 GB and with four agencies to submit to, took around 24 hours to complete. The program then logs in, enters the keywords, descriptions, pricing etc. and automatically submits them. You can still go to the sites to choose a specific thumbnail if you want, although I’m not sure that is possible in the new Adobe contributor site once it has been submitted.
All in all, this program has become one of my key tools in managing multiple agencies. It can handle all the agencies I now work with and with video covered as well, takes away quite a load from my day to day work. Although you have to pay to use it (beyond the relatively small free version), I think it is well worth the money. If you are not yet convinced, you can actually use all the features apart from the submission feature on any number of images or videos each month – it is just the submission part that is subject to restrictions.
Did try it. But it did not work. Keywords and so on did not work on videos for me. Just testing the free version without login in.
Did you get any sort of error? To upload videos, I believe the program creates standalone JPEGs that hold the keywords – this is invisible to you, but is used to later submit the images. So the video itself is uploaded without any keywords as there is no easy way to put those in the file. Then the app logs onto each video site and enters the keywords as though you were typing them in, and then submits. Did you go all the way to the submit part?
Steve
Maybe have i missed a step then. I did upload the video. But there is a submit button to. That maybe do the keyword adding then?
I hade missed a step .. thanks 🙂 This i awesome 🙂
It continuously says that timeout exceeded? Have you seen this error?
For video? I have occasionally had that error, but I assumed it was that the distant site was taking too long to respond when uploading the file. I’m not completely sure how FTP works, but I assume the servers confirm to each other that they have sent and received each block of information and there is a time allowed for that. I haven’t checked, but are there any different settings you can use in the agency specific information?
I don’t understand why ANYONE thinks this is a good service? I have tried it several times, and always find I spend a lot more time trying to get this *&^% software to upload than I ever would if I just continued doing it myself separately.
I tried again this week. I have now spent 3 DAYS trying to get Stock Submitter to upload 17 video clips. I tried roughly 10 times before it would send to Pond5 (which it is uploading as I type this). Similar multiple tries before they would finally upload to StoryBlocks, Dreamstime or DepositPhotos. I still have not gotten it to go to ShutterStock, and I am about to simply give up.
And of those, only DepositPhotos (probably the least useful of all the sites) actually succeeded in submitting. The others are still stuck with upload but not yet submitted after 2 days.
I’m really sorry that you are having these issues. I have used it for the past 2 or 3 years now and have never had one issue like you are describing. I tried Microstock Plus with a couple of 4K videos yesterday and that worked fine as well. I’m no software developer and so can’t explain why you are having these issues, but all I can say is that I haven’t seen them.
Steve
Hiya Steve ,,,thank you very much , again , for your much informative blog …since I have thousands of pictures to upload – 40 years worth of picture taking – and quite a few videos . I think StockSubmitter , latest version , deals with a lot of the above issues discussed , specially with video . But with video what I have been reading about it is that you must have a pretty decent internet bandwith ..which will make sense really..then StockSubmitter should work fine.
I am going to subscribe to stocksubmitter and see how I get along…I just was not too sure about if it had the video uploading facility . Thanks for confirming that.
I´ll see how I get along with the free version first…!!!
Yes, you do need fast bandwidth to get those large files online. However, you should investigate the service they have added called Microstock Plus – it is integrated into Stock Submitter (or you can just use as a cloud based service) and with that, you upload the video once to their website and then they do the onward uploading to the various stock agencies. So it saves your own bandwidth and uses theirs instead. At the moment that is a free addition – not sure how it will be charged in future.
Steve