Stock photography workflow...

If you have time to spare then you can fill it very quickly if you have a less than organised approach to selling your images. Everyone is different but if your aim is to make a living from photography then you have to focus on the techniques that will save you time. Capturing the image may take 1/250th second but everything that follows can be a pain in the butt.

I am building improvements into photoconnect to fit my way of working. Although I may not use the same camera or software as others, the principles of this workflow will I am sure be used my many photographers who submit images to multiple online agencies.

1. Take pic with no sharpening and normall no other fancy settings on the camera
   
2. Capture in RAW & fix histogram etc if necessary using Capture One.
   
3. Convert to 16 bit TIFF using Capture One
4. The original RAW file is retained and backed up
5. Resize unsharpened on camera original for Alamy using Paint Shop Pro (no sharpening!)
6. Save as LZW TIFF
7. Use Image Info Toolkit to add captions and keywords
8. Send images into Alamy & retain files as originals for other uses & backup
9. For MyLoupe I resize Alamy images to 72% and 48% in ACDSee (which retains all IPTC data) and save as 8% compressed JPEG
10. Upload to MyLoupe 6 images at a time (10 never works!)
    
11. For Photoconnect resize Alamy images to 11% and sharpen so display looks good on web
    
12. Load to photoconnect
13. One click to keywords on photoconnect
14. Link in photoconnect image to Alamy for that instant download effect

The only time that keywording is done is once at step 7.

If you do steps 8 to 11 in Paint Shop Pro then you lose the keywords. It MAY be OK to resize in Photoshop depending on what version you have - if you lose your keywords then you have to look at alternatives.