Image Search Engine Optimization for Photographers

Over the past few years, reduced agency commissions have become a growing concern for photographers. At the same time, several viable options have surfaced which allow a photographer to strike out on her own and form a sort of virtual photo agency.

Some options require more web programming knowledge than others. More experienced web programmers may opt to build their websites from the ground up, complete with e-commerce functions.

In this article we will introduce basic search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to photographers unfamiliar with the process. We will concentrate on SEO specifically as it relates to our images.

SEO – What is it?

SEO has received a questionable reputation in some circles due to unsavory black hat practices by web designers looking to manipulate search results. There is no black magic occurring. At its core, SEO is nothing more than the process of optimizing our websites so search engines can understand and properly rank our content.

SEO is of particular importance for photographers. Images are certain to be the basis for any photographer website. However search engines such as Google cannot “see” an image. The first priority when dealing with images is to ensure the search engine knows what it is.

Image Tags

Since a search engine cannot figure out what an image is about, we need to tell it. We must tag our images using the title and alt attribute fields. When tagging our images, it is important that the description be concise, yet keyword rich. Avoid being abstract in your description.

For instance you might have a photo of a boss yelling at an employee on the first day back from the weekend. An artistic name choice might be “Blue Monday.” But you would be making a mistake using such an abstract name. You need to place yourself in the role of someone searching for images. They aren’t going to type “blue monday” into a search engine if they need an image of a boss yelling an employee. Be simple and concise. Fill out the image title and alt attribute fields with a keyword rich description like “Manager Yelling at Employee”.

But this is still not enough. The actual file name for our image is also important. If you uploaded the image using the default name given to it by the camera, how do you think a search engine will interpret “IMG2486.jpg”? Just like our tags, it is important our file name be simple and descriptive.

However we need to eliminate spaces and underscores, which tend to give search engines problems, and replace them with dashes. Google is on record as saying it treats words separated by dashes as individual keywords to be evaluated. An example file name that you would upload would be “angry-boss.jpg” or something similar.

Captions and Surrounding Text

Search engines also put weight on the text surrounding the image when determining which keywords are most relevant to the image. For this reason, I like to use captions with my images. These should be simple and keyword rich, like our image tags. But they don’t have to be quite as concise.

If your image is part of a larger article or blog post, position it in relation to text which is highly relevant to the image. This too will send a positive message to the search engines that the words near your image should be used to help describe it.

Meta Keywords – Hold the Stuffing

If you are able to import IPTC data to your website, you might be able to use the keywords in your image file to populate the meta keywords of your webpage. This is important if you are selling royalty-free images and each image has its own page where buyers can choose to add it to a shopping cart. You want this page to be found by search engines, and it is helpful if your IPTC keywords can become your meta keywords for the image’s webpage.

If you are importing IPTC keywords, you need to ensure your keyword list is relevant and concise. Populating a web page with 30, 40, 50 or more keywords will not fly with the search engines the way it does at some photo agencies. Search engines flag this many keywords as potential spam, and refer to it as “keyword stuffing.”

Keep your meta keywords to 10 words/phrases or less. Keyword stuffing will send you straight to the bottom of the search results, and might even get your website eliminated from some search engines.

Conclusion

Image SEO requires necessary tags be filled with concise, descriptive text. Image file names should be also be simple and relevant, with dashes separating each word. Surrounding our images with text related to the image (such as in an article, or by using a caption) helps search engines better determine what keywords and phrases are most relevant to our images.

Next time, I will discuss making the image part of a larger, content-rich website.

2011 Microstock Industry Survey – First Look

Over 700 people responded to the 2011 Microstock Industry Survey (709 to be exact), beating our previous year’s record by nearly 100 responses (nearly 200 more responses compared to this time last year).   Thanks everyone!  If you haven’t had a chance to fill out the survey, you can do so here.  All responses will be included in future analysis.

The survey is also available in Russian and German, thanks to MerLin (Microstock Submitter)  and Amos (fotos-verkaufen) for that.

This is the ‘first look’ at the survey which simply presents raw data calculations and figures.  In future posts I’ll compare the stats to previous years and analyze the data within itself (earnings vs portfolio size for example).

Disclaimer

I am not a scientist, statistician nor mathemagician.  This survey gives a general idea of the current state of the microstock industry based on 700+ people’s view.  The respondents for this survey are self-chosen after following a link online (MicrostockGroup Forum, Microstock.ru Forum, ThePhotoForum, DPChallenge, Shutterstock Forum, Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus,  iStock, Facebook stock group, Yahoo Groups, Fotolia (Thread was removed)) or a direct email (from the MicrostockGroup mailing list).  I publicized the survey in as many places as possible to minimize a bias towards any one group of respondents.  There is a healthy profile of respondents from various sites, countries and exclusive / non-exclusive status. The results will obviously be biased towards people who are interested and active in microstock photography and leaves out those who have given up or forgotten they even had images online, but isn’t that want we want to know anyhow?  We want to know how WE are doing, we who are trying to make this work.  I believe these results tell us.

I have included the 2010 results in brackets where applicable.

Microstocker Profile

Gender:

Male: 548 – 77% (372 – 71%)
Female: 161 – 23% (152 – 29%)

Where have all the women gone?

 

Age:

Average Age: 42.7 (40.4)
Oldest: 85 (84) (looks like Smiling Jack is still at it , albeit a year older)
Youngest: 15 (16)

Media Types Submitted:

Photography: 636 – 90% (460 – 90%)
Illustration: 192 – 27% (163 – 31%)
Video: 107 – 15% (61 – 10%)
Audio: 18 – 5%  (5 – 1%)

The numbers this year show a very similar profile compared to 2010.  Illustration numbers are slightly down while it looks like there are more people working with video and audio.  This could be due to people experimenting in other media, or simply a slightly different sample group of respondents.  We can look more into this and get an answer in future analysis.

Are you exclusive to iStockPhoto?

Exclusive: 147 – 21% (126 – 24%)
Non-Exclusive: 562 – 79% (398 – 76%)

Is microstock your primary source of income (over 50%)?

Yes: 170 – 24% (129 – 25%)
No: 539 – 76% (395 – 75%)

Very similar results compared to 2010, which both confirm the accuracy of the survey and the randomness of the participants.  With nearly 200 more respondents, the profile is very similar.

How many images do you have online?

Average: 2191 (1450)
Median: 952 (700)

How many illustrations do you have online?

Average: 744 (525)
Median: 200 (250)

How many videos do you have online?

Average: 248 (82)
Median: 28 (15)

How many audio files do you have online?

Average: 160 (40)
Median: 25 (58)

How many months have you been involved in microstock?

Average: 44 (36)
Median: 42 (35)
Max: 140 (108)
Minimum: 1 (1)

Income

Average microstock income: $17,016 ($13,439)
Median income: $3000 ($3173)

It’s always exciting seeing how the money is doing.  There is a big jump in average income this year.  More analysis to come – but needless to say it is exciting to see 26 people reporting an income of over $100,000 with many many more in the high 5 figure amounts.

Highest reported income: $900,000 ($211,708)
Lowest reported income: $0 ($1)

Did your microstock income increase or decrease in 2011?

Increase: 398 – 56%  (450 – 86%)
Decrease: 169 – 24% (74 – 14%)

It’s been a tough year in microstock for a lot of people.  Quite clearly shown here with only 56% of people reporting an increase in income.

Microstock Agencies Breakdown

What agencies do you submit to?

Where do you generate the most income?

Obviously this is for non-exclusives – but wow, Shutterstock is really grabbing more of the pie here.  In 2010 48% of respondents indicated that Shutterstock was their top grossing site.

Which site gave you the highest return per image (RPI)?

Last year iStock had 30% of the votes on this question, this year they sit at 15%.  There have been a lot of reports (complaints) on the MicrostockGroup forum (and elsewhere) of falling income for independents (and some exclusives) – this graph appears to confirm that.  Last year Shutterstock got 27% of the votes, this year they were nudged up to 37%.

Outsourcing / Team Work

Do you outsource any part of your workflow?

This is the first year I’ve asked this question. 40 people (6%) of the respondents outsource some part of their workflow, I’m guessing this number will only grow in the future.  Outsource specific analysis of the stats will be the subject of a future blog post.

Do you have full or part time employee’s (or work as part of a team or with a partner)?

Microstock Outlook

It appears the majority of people still have a positive outlook on the industry.  69% of the respondents feel the future is positive, with 63% of photographers saying they plan on submitting more content next year compared to previous years.

Do you feel the future of microstock is positive?

Do you plan to submit more or less photos this year compared to last year?

 

Stay Tuned

There have certainly been some changes and shuffling of market share in the last year but overall I’d say things still look positive and I’m excited about 2012.  I’m also excited to do more in-depth analysis of the stats – Keep in touch with RSS, Twitter, or join the mailing list so you don’t miss out.

If you have any specific analysis you think would be interesting, let me know in the comments below.

 

ColorChecker Passport Giveaway

As a thanks to everyone who filled out the survey, MicrostockGroup is giving away a ColorCheck Passport to one of the respondents who indicated they wanted to be entered (210 people did so).  WolframAlpha was used to generate a random number…

193 corresponded to Ken Hunter, congrats! … that said, he hasn’t responded to my ‘you won’ email yet – I’ll give him another week or so before picking someone else.  If you’re out there Ken, let me know your mailing address. Update Update:  Ken has been found here’s his portfolio on Alamy,The ColorCheck Passport has been ordered and delivered.  Hope you can make good use of it Ken.

—

[Survey Discussion on the Microstock Forum]

iStockphoto 2012: Semi-Annual Analysis

Our semi-annual analysis of iStockphoto sales has once again produced interesting results. As of January 2, 1012 istockcharts was tracking the sales of 38,163 of the more than 100,000 iStock contributors. More than 90% of the images in the iStock collection belong to this group of contributor. Combined these contributors have had a minimum of 114,875,519+ downloads since each started working with iStock. During 2011 alone a minimum of 18,615,558+ images (and probably about 21.5 million) were licensed for use.

In order to determine the actual number of images licensed (downloaded) we need to account for the plus (+) factor. iStock provides statistic on the number of downloads of each contributor, but rounds the number they make public to the nearest lower whole number. For example a contributor’s downloads may be listed at 10,000+. The actual number is somewhere between 10,000 and 10,999. When the number hits 11,000 it will be shown as 11,000+. The actual number of downloads is somewhere between the lowest and highest number in the range.

To estimate total images downloaded in 2011 we have taken the middle number in the range and multiplied it by the number of contributors in each group. This gives us an estimated total downloads of 21,503,353 for 2011.

These 38,163 contributors added about 1,817,217 images to the collection in 2011 and grew the collection by about 25% to a combined total of 9,224,159 images. (This number is in excess of 90% of the total iStockphoto collection.)

We have also tracked 195 of the leading contributors for almost three years. Of the total images in the collection 705,290 or about 7% belong to these 195 contributors. These contributors added 95,099 images in 2010 and 96,450 in 2011 and grew their collections by 37% in the last two years. They also have had 29,604,000+ downloads during their iStock careers which represent about 25% of all iStock sales.

The numbers indicate that the vast majority of contributors whose numbers are not tracked by istockcharts have placed very few images on the site. Well over 60,000 contributors have placed less than one million images on the site, or maybe an average of about 15 images each. Very few of these ever sell. In fact 6,635 of the contributors tracked by istockcharts have had fewer than 10 downloads.

Declining Sales

The last time iStockphoto publicly reported its sales figures was in 2007 when they said they had 17.55 million downloads and gross revenue of $72 million. We believe they had about 25 million downloads in 2008 and generated approximately $163 million in revenue that year. Since then the number of units licensed have been declining, but revenue has continued to rise due to price increases.

We believe the company’s gross revenue in 2011 was about $350 million. Dividing that by our estimated total downloads of 21.5 million the average license fee for an image was in the range of $16.25. The 5771 exclusive contributors (about 5% of total contributors) have been the main beneficiaries of the price increases. The prices for Exclusive, Exclusive+, Vetta and The Agency Collection (TAC) images are higher than for non-exclusive images; the royalty share is higher and the exclusive images are given preference in the search return order.

Even with these advantages many exclusive contributors are seeing declining unit sales. Of the 195 leading sellers 30 probably had more downloads in 2011 than in 2010 (check the second chart).  Another 25 had about the same number of downloads and 140 had fewer downloads in 2011 than in 2010.

195 Top Producers

For comparative information on 195 of the top producers go to http://www.photolicensingoptions.com/ViewArticle.aspx?code=JHP2540. A small fee is charged to access this information. The list shows how contributor positions on the istockcharts list have changed since May 2009 when we started tracking data.
We also provide data on the minimum and possible maximum number of downloads of each contributor in 2010 and 2011 as well as the number of images each added to the collection in those years. It is important to recognize that the images of this small group of 195 contributors represent at least 25% of all the images that have been downloaded from iStockphoto in its history.

Licensing Images In Today’s Market

 

I’m regularly contacted by photographers, some with excellent portfolios, wanting to know how they can license rights to their images in today’s market. Recently, I was contacted by a nature and wildlife photographer whose work was excellent. This photographer regularly conducts Photo Workshops where he teaches others how to take great scenic and wildlife pictures. Here’s what I told him.

The problem is in how to get your images where customers can see them. Two good specialist wildlife agencies in the U.S. are Animals Animals/Earth Scenes and Minden Pictures

However, today, most customers are going to large online databases to find the images they need. Among the ones that license images at RM or traditional RF prices are: Getty Images, Corbis, Alamy, Veer, Masterfile, Superstock, AGE (Spain), Marutius (Germany), Picturemaxx (Germany), and FotoSearch in the U.S. (FotoSearch doesn’t accept images from individual photographers, only agents and production companies.) In addition there are four microstock sites – iStockphoto.com, Shutterstock.com, Dreamstime.com and Fotolia.com – that you may want to consider.

Most of these major RM and RF marketers not only accept images from individual photographers but also from many smaller agencies. If you put your images with a smaller agency with a good reputation chances are that some of the images will end up in one or more of these major databases. Before signing with an agency that licenses work as RM or RF ask for the names of the distributors that represent their work. Also try to determine the percentage of the agency’s gross revenue that comes from direct sales to customers as opposed to sales made through distributors. The problem with distributor sales is that the photographer has to give up a double cut of the fee paid.

One of the first things to decide is whether you are committed to licensing your images as RM or traditional RF, or whether you are willing to accept the microstock philosophy of volume sales at much lower prices. If you license your images as RM there is a possibility of getting multi-thousand dollar sales, but such sales are very rare. The odds of making a big advertising sale in today’s market are about the same as winning the Lottery. It’s not that your images aren’t good enough to compete at that level. It’s that they will be competing against so many other reasonably good images. If you put your images in traditional RF the top price you can get is less than $1,000, but the odds of making a sale at all are about twice as good as having an image on an RM site.

I estimate that worldwide in 2010 there were about 1.5 million RM and about 3 million RF images licensed at traditional prices. During the same period over 100 million uses were licensed at microstock prices. Given the number of images available at RM and RF prices the chances of any particular image being licensed are very slim. For example, Alamy has about 27 million images in its database. Based on figures published two years ago they will probably license rights to about 200,000 individual usages in 2011. Thus, at Alamy less than one out of every 100 images are licensed in any given year.

The odds of a microstock image being licensed are much better, but the price per license will often be very low. You need to decide if you will be upset when some company uses one of your snow covered mountain scenes for a web site promoting a ski resort or selling camping equipment, and pays less than $10 for the use. If so, then you don’t want to offer the pictures for sale as microstock. But, chances are if you choose the microstock route your images will get used 75 to 100 times more frequently than would be the case if they are licensed as RM.

Today, very few photographers are earning enough from stock sales alone to support themselves. On the other hand I think there are about the same number of microstock photographers earning in excess of $75,000 a year as there are traditional RF or (RM photographers earning at that level.

Oversupply

You need to recognize that there is a tremendous oversupply of nature, wildlife and landscape images. (The same is true for almost every other subject matter.) Your images are certainly much better on a quality and artistic level than most of the images out there, but unfortunately that isn’t all it takes to make sales. Getting the images seen by potential customers is the big problem.

Here’s a list of the number of images in a few categories at 4 of the major distributors.

Statistics show that the vast majority of customers choose an image from those found in the first 300 reviewed in a web search. Very few look at more than a few hundred images in any category before making a decision either to buy, or go somewhere else. So the question is how do you get your images shown in that first 300. Customers can’t buy what they don’t see. At most sites the newest images uploaded play a major role in the sequence images are shown. This means that newly uploaded images have a chance of being seen in the first weeks or months after being uploaded. But it won’t be long until they are pushed down below that 300 level.

Using additional keywords to define specific aspects of an image may keep your image high in the search returns for a longer period of time – assuming some customers actually use the words you’ve inputted to search for images. Specifics don’t always help because many customers are looking for more generic images.

Algorithms Rather Than Professional Editing

Twenty years ago customers would call a picture agency for research, describe what they were looking for and the agency’s researchers would go through the files and pick a selection of images that they thought would fit the customer’s needs. The researchers got to know the best images in their collections. They would continually go back to older images they liked because they had developed a sense of what their customers wanted. New images weren’t sent out just because they were new. Now, all that personal visual judgment is gone. At the RM and traditional RF agencies the personal judgment of image quality and appropriateness of the subject matter has been replaced by computer algorithms that are heavily dependent on words.

The microstock sellers (iStockphoto, Shutterstock, et al) do offer a variety of ways for the customers to organize search returns. One is usually the number of times an image has been downloaded or purchased. There aren’t any good public figures on how frequently customers use any of the sort options, but it is believed that a significant percentage of customers sort on number of downloads when it is an option. This gives the customer the benefit of quickly seeing the images that a huge number of other customers found useful and purchased. In one sense the picture research principle is still working. But, it is now much harder for that new image that has just arrived to ever get seen unless the customer is smart enough to do a search for “newest” images as well as a separate search for most “downloads.”

Take iStockphoto for example. The top selling waterfall image has been licensed over 2,000 times; mountains, 1,500 times; domestic cats, 1,500 times; and tigers, 1400 times. I encourage you to go to iStockphoto, search for the subject matter in your collection, sort by downloads, see how many times some of the images have been downloaded and how long they have been on that site.

Look at some on the first page, but also look at the 100th and 300th image to see how quickly the number of downloads falls off. This will give you a good idea of the demand for that subject matter.

Traditional sites (RM and RF) don’t offer a variety of search options like the microstock sites do. With traditional sites the search order is pre-determined by the distributor and the customer must take-it-or-leave-it. Traditionals do use complex computer algorithms that attempt to bring certain images to the top, but often they are based on which images will generate the most revenue for the distributor (lowest royalty percentage for the creator) rather than a visual judgment of image quality and appropriateness that a good editor might make. In some cases weight is given to the number of times an image has been viewed, put in a lightbox, or licensed. Part of the problem is that the information about how the algorithms work is considered proprietary and not shared with the image suppliers.

Industry Trends

More and more customers are going to the microstock sites to find most of the images they need. Microstock prices, while still low, are going up. Price for RM images are going down as the sellers of these products try to compete with microstock. Many RM images and now being licensed for prices lower than microstock The proportional share of images licensed as RM relative to the share licensed as microstock is declining steadily.

Most of the RM companies (Alamy excepted) will want exclusive rights to the images (and similars) they accept. To maximize earnings it is important to have your images in as many different places as possible so they can be seen by the broadest possible cross section of customers. You can put the same images with multiple microstock sites plus Alamy on a non-exclusive basis.

For more information check out:

Getting Images Seen
http://www.photolicensingoptions.com/ViewArticle.aspx?code=JHP2409

2011 Stock Photo Market Size
http://www.photolicensingoptions.com/ViewArticle.aspx?code=JHP2501

Average Return from iStockphoto
http://www.photolicensingoptions.com/ViewArticle.aspx?code=JHP2486

MicrostockExpo Checklist

The MicrostockExpo in Berlin is approaching fast (4 days to go).  If you haven’t purchased your ticket, there is still time and room to join the 125+ 140+ other attendees.

And for those attending, I thought I’d put together a little check list.

Remember your Business Cards

Yes you should bring some (lots).  It isn’t even a question.  You are going to be meeting many many people in a short time span and you (nor the people you meet) will be able to remember all the names.  They may remember where you are from / which company your worked for or the style of pictures you take, and maybe the color of your hair, but not your name and certainly not your email or website.  Most everyone has cards and it is a great way to easily exchange contact information on the fly. If you don’t have any already made, you should run down to your local printer and get some printed up, or make some on a home printer and get out the sparkles and glue.  Anything is better than nothing.

Plan Who You Want to Talk To

With so many people and so little time, you’re not going to get to talk to everyone.  If you have someone you especially want to have a conversation with, make sure you set up a meeting time.  The meeting is never expected to be formal and may end up including others that happen to be ‘around’, but you’ll be sure to get in a conversation with that person you wanted to chat with.

Introduce Yourself

There will be lots of people attending the conference alone and lots of people who would like to meet you.  Even if you’re not an extrovert, walk up to people and introduce yourself.  You are guaranteed to have something in common (microstock) and you may get some fun surprises of who you ‘discover’.   Perhaps you’ll find someone you have been in discussion with on a Microstock Forum or possibly the CEO of your favorite agency.

Plan Your Day

The Microstock Expo has a packed program.  Make sure you make note of which sessions you want to attend and which you can do without.  Once you get chatting with your new friends it’s easy to loose track of the time and miss a useful session.  At the same time, if you spend the entire time in sessions there may be too little time for socializing and browsing the exhibitor booths.

Stay Connected

If you find yourself standing around, wondering what to do – check out the latest conference tweets [shortcode #mexpo] and Forum thread on MicorstockGroup.  People may be gathering in a pub / bar / coffeeshop and you’ll be invited.