While companies like Apple shoot most of their own photography and/or create their own renders, most companies rely a great deal on so-called ‘stock photography’ – photos shot on spec by photographers in the hope of licensing them to companies later.
Selling stock photography can be extremely hard work. You have to upload and keyword them, and the percentage of photos that sell is very low even for top-notch photographers. But if you want to give it a shot, Adobe has just made the process really painless …
Adobe has already been pushing companies toward its own stock photography site by making photos available right from within its own Creative Cloud apps like Photoshop and InDesign, and it’s now taking the same approach when it comes to photographers uploading photos.
First, you can upload photos right from within Lightroom and Bridge. To do this, you’ll need the latest versions of the apps: Lightroom CC 2015.7, Lightroom 6.7 and ACR 9.7.
Second, Adobe uses machine-learning to automatically scan the content of the photos to suggest the top five keywords. If you’re happy with them, simply approve them and you’re done.
As someone who has sold a certain amount of stock photography in the past, I should caution that you’ll probably need to put in a bit more work to have a real chance of sales. Adobe may manage to automatically apply keywords like woman, bubbles and colorful, but it’s the more abstract keywords like carefree, joyous and wishing that often generate sales.
But if you want to get the chance to maybe see a paycheck from the photos already on your drive, this is a pretty simple way to dip a toe in the water.
The Adobe Stock Contributor Site is in beta for now. Check out the video intro below, and Adobe’s help pages for specifics. You might also want to take a look at my guide on getting the best results from your iPhone camera.
