I’ve just recently been approved to submit photos to both iStockphoto and Veer. Though neither accept editorial submissions—which are my bread and butter—I have a fair collection of royalty free qualifying images that I can experiment with. I’m just getting started, so it’s hard to say if the sales will be worth it, but my motivation is spurred partly because they’re owned by Getty and Corbis, respectively, two major stock houses that one would assume would do a good job of supporting their microstock stepchildren.

First impressions: both are extremely picky compared to my top-selling sites Dreamstime and Shutterstock. It took a couple of rounds with each to get accepted as a contributor, and I’ve gotten a lot of rejections on the basis of “artifacting when viewed at full size”—sometimes on virtually noiseless photos taken at ISO 400 in broad daylight. Sometimes images from the same series seem to be somewhat arbitrarily accepted and rejected. Both are also hard core about “chromatic aberration”—something that can’t always be fixed in Lightroom. I sometimes feel like they’re trying to get me to buy better cameras and lenses.  But I’ll stick with them for a while to see if the sales make up for the hassle.

Other first impressions: iStock’s user interface and upload process is so stupid terrible that there seems to be  a host of third party software offerings to make it halfway reasonable. For example, on using their basic upload tool (they don’t offer FTP!) keywords and other IPTC data were not automatically imported, or imported only on a sporadic basis. User forums confirmed that this was a pervasive problem. Wow. I’ve been using the free software Deepmeta to manage my iStock uploads, and it works pretty well. Veer’s interface is considerably better—and quite elegant—but their batch processing is still pretty lousy compared to sites like BigStock (the best processing backend, in spite of lackluster sales).

BTW, my Fotolia sales are pretty crappy so far. I think the sites that accept editorial stock will always do better for me, but I figure the experiment with other sites is worth it, even if they only send a trickle of income my way.