Using IPTC to Speed Up Work with Stock Photography

Anyone who has already started working with stock photo sites and reached a certain workflow volume eventually faces the challenge: how to speed up uploading and attribution? This becomes especially critical when you are working with multiple stock sites simultaneously. One efficient solution for streamlining submissions to stock photo sites is embedding IPTC metadata directly into image files. Of course, if you work as an exclusive contributor on a single site, time optimization may not be as pressing. Still, using IPTC metadata can save contributors a great deal of effort.

For many beginners in stock photography, the term IPTC might sound unfamiliar. In essence, IPTC data refers to metadata embedded into a photo or illustration that can be extracted with specialized software.

Almost all modern digital cameras already allow some IPTC data embedding. Typically, cameras save information like brand, model, and shooting details. Of course, technology isn’t sophisticated enough to automatically add titles, keywords, or descriptions. With vector graphics, it’s the same – editors don’t assign that metadata automatically. However, when saving your final file, you can fill in the IPTC fields with all required information.

Virtually all top stock photo agencies can read IPTC data from the image file and automatically populate fields like keywords, descriptions, and titles during upload. This makes the submission process much faster and easier.

To add IPTC data to your photos or illustrations, you can use Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Apple iPhoto, XnView, or any graphics editor that supports IPTC input. For example, in Adobe software: open the file, go to the File menu, then click File Info…, and fill in the fields such as Name, Keywords, and Description. Finally, save the file.

In practical terms, if you submit images to 5–10 microstocks at once, embedding IPTC data means you only need to add the title, keywords, and description once. Categories will still have to be chosen manually on each site, but the overall process becomes much faster.

Moreover, IPTC metadata is extremely useful when a new stock agency appears and you decide to upload your entire portfolio there. Imagine manually describing 2,000–3,000 files! With IPTC, you just upload, select categories, and start earning from stock photo sales much faster.

Embedding IPTC metadata into your image files is a powerful way to reduce submission time and maximize workflow efficiency for contributors on multiple platforms.