My Lookstat trial
Posted by mattantonino | Posted in Sponsors, business | Posted on 09-11-2009
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Lookstat offers a trial of their new keywording & uploading back office services. 25 images will be uploaded to up to 10 sites for no charge, no strings, no payment info given.
Now, before anyone asks, you do have to provide your microstock site credentials. If you aren’t comfortable with providing this to a service provider you need read no further. Understandably, you’re not going to be interested in this service. That’s the first stage of getting setup.
Onto my trial!
I ftp’d the 25 images to Lookstat and a few days later started getting confirmation of the accepted and denied images. I did nothing much in the middle except look at the keywords and approve them. While in this step you can update, add, remove, change anything you want. They did a pretty good job on mine though and I didn’t change a lot.
For me, the trial went extremely well. The images were uploaded, they were almost entirely approved and the rejections were for image stuff not keywords or model releases.
The PROS
Most of the non-creative work taken care of for you.
Better keywording than you probably do on your own.
More time to be shooting & editing.
The CONS
Cost – contact Lookstat for details but it’s not the cheapest service.
Time – the ramp-up time killed me. FTPd the files, waited…waited…then started seeing them.
Handing over credentials – some people will find this a major con. I don’t, but …
Doing 10 sites for me meant that I had to do the rest on my own – which means either waiting longer to get the keyworded images to sub to my other sites.
Conclusions: Am I going to do it?
For now, no. During our wedding offseason I’m full time at stock so I have all the time in the world now to edit, keyword, upload and push images through. This is MY job for the next 6-8 months. Unfortunately once weddings start in June I will lose all the momentum I build this winter. I may use Lookstat then to keep uploading for me. The more images I can get edited between now and June the better, no matter how many I can keyword and edit. I’m still going to shoot to do as much as I can but it feels really great knowing there’s some backup to keep my flow going.
I encourage any Q&A in the comments – I know Rahul reads them and will respond. I would love for him to jump in and explain the ramp-up time better than I can as well as anything else he’d like!
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Hi Matt,
Thanks for diving in on the trial and for summarizing your thoughts. We hope we can help you out during the summer next year!
In terms of ramp time, one issue is a function of trial demand. We had a ton of interest and needed to add capacity to deal with it. This is an operational issue we need to fix. There is also an overhead associated with a first time account setup that doesn’t exist for subsequent batches.
In the steady state, once you have images coming in regularly, they get keyworded & submitted pretty much continuously.
Regardless of the reasons, I’m sorry we didn’t meet your expectations around timing. We can get better here and the feedback is greatly appreciated.
Rahul
Hey there,
Nice review. I have been planning on writing up a blog post as well but STILL haven’t gotten around to making use of the 25 free trial account images. Great to read what you thought of the service and gives me a good kick to take advantage of the offer.
Nice to know there are services like this we can fall back on, even if many of us are DIY-er’s. Thanks for the review, Matt.