19 May 2007 IPTC Data – The Ultimate Microstock Time Saver

If you upload photos to sell on the microstock websites and you don’t know about IPTC data yet, you’re about to start saving some serious time.

IPTC data is metadata – data embedded in the photo. Your camera likely puts some IPTC data into your image files already, including the brand and model of the camera and photographic information about the photo. Camera’s aren’t yet clever enough to title and describe our images, but we can do it manually. How this can save you time is that all the microstock websites have conveniently set their systems to automatically read IPTC data and populate the title, description and keyword fields for you!

IPTC stands for “International Press Telecommunications Council” which is the name of the organisation who created the standard. The majority of cameras support this standard, and all the microstock websites mentioned on this blog will utilize the data. You can manually set your IPTC data using Adobe Photoshop, Apple iPhoto, or any serious image editing tool.

If you’re uploading photos to multiple microstock websites, entering IPTC data can reduce the number of times you enter the title, description and keywords to one. Unfortunately you’ll still need to individually enter the categories on the individual websites that require categories. But it’ll seem a simple chore compared to pre-IPTC data entry. Enjoy.