Alexandre Rotenberg

Review: Wirestock: Sell on all stock agencies from one place

Wirestock is a new agency that will make your stock photography workflow easier by keywording and uploading to multiple content marketplaces, including Shutterstock, Adobe Stock and Alamy, etc. This professional service helps free up contributors’ valuable free time / energy so they can stick to what is the most fun: shooting!

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Wirestock’s automated image submission. Source

One-door access to the largest content marketplaces

Wirestock provides a one-door access to the largest content marketplaces (Shutterstock, Adobe, Dreamstime, Alamy, Depositphotos, Pond5). Instead of opening accounts on each and every site, the creator opens one account and submits all their images to all the largest marketplaces from one place (also possible to opt out of specific agencies). With Wirestock, it becomes irrelevant debating about the best place to sell photos as it aggregates all of them.

Keywording and Captioning

In addition, Wirestock’s best-selling point is that they have a dedicated in-house team that will keyword the commercial images to a high-level. More on this later with some concrete examples.

Getting paid

Wirestock provides the ability to track and collect all of your earnings from a single site. Wirestock provides a single dashboard for tracking all sales from all agencies and allows withdrawing all their royalties from all sites with a single request ($30 minimum threshold).

after midnight-2

How much commission do they charge?

Given all the benefits mentioned above, Wirestock has become a no-brainer for anyone who wants to start in stock photography also considering that the tool is free to use and only charges 15% commission on paid royalties. Wirestock do not make money unless the creator does, which is more than fair. I would imagine that Wirestock are already at a top-tier level at Shutterstock, which means you’d start earning more right away (38cents vs 25cents on the subs)

Keep in mind that Blackbox, which provides a similar service on the footage side, also charges 15% commission on paid royalties.

Getting Started

Easy to read dashboard

All sales information is readily-available on the Wirestock Dashboard, see example below:

cc5c494710c638550b21614a317daee987afb528
Sleek-looking dashboard

Brutally Honest Experiment

I thought, what better way to test them than do it myself? So, I’ve uploaded 50 of my own (no sales yet but still early days) images to them and wanted to see in particular how well they’ve keyworded. But first, how to upload:

Uploading Commercial Images

Well, uploading to them is super easy. Just drag and drop, literally. Oh then click, submit and they do the rest.

uploading
Simply drag and drop, at least for commercial images

I checked within a few days and lo and behold most of my images were up for sale at the agencies. Wirestock did, however, reject, some of my batch which would have probably been rejected by the agencies anyway.

Uploading Editorial Images

In case of editorial, it’s trickier since they will still have you do the grudge work by inserting the correction caption/description and keywording.

editorial

Seems slightly unfair to still do all the work and give them a commission on sales. So, I quizzed Wirestock on this, for which they responded:

“In the future, we may add easy submission for editorials too only requiring to add location and date in case if our system can’t detect it. As for Wirestock’s value for creators, please take into account that many of our contributors are either new to stock photography or not very experienced. They prefer to pay 15% and not have to open accounts on 6-7 different websites, use software like stocksubmitter, deal with ftp, receive payments from multiple sites and etc. Having a one-door access to the largest agencies is also a great time saver even if you have to the keywording yourself.”

Alamy ranking and keywording

I was particularly curious about just how good their (commercial) keywording is…so I checked out their Alamy portfolio consisting of 42,000 images to dig deeper. For sake of completeness, you can also check out their 24,000-image Shutterstock portfolio.

I decided to click on the following three images that stood out and see their keywords as a gauge, also recommend you do it yourself:

Example 1:

flower
Good stuff that Wirestock were able to provide the scientific name which is useful for some buyers

Example 2:

iran
Good stuff that Wirestock were able to pinpoint the exact landmark. Perhaps they had help from the contributor (impossible to say for sure)

Example 3:

cool dog
Again, good job in picking up the breed of the dog and all the major keywords surrounding it’s “coolness”

More on Alamy ranking

Alamy is a funny site in that depending on how well (or not) ranked your portfolio is relative to others, your images would appear (or not) at the higher rankings. To make a long story short, being part of the Wirestock Alamy portfolio is better than starting out by yourself due to this competitive advantage in keywording.

Who would benefit from this service?

Who would benefit from Wirestock?

  • Contributors that may not have much time to keywork/upload
  • Contributors that don’t have a great command of English to keyword
  • Contributors that may be struggling to have good sales on Alamy due to perhaps low keyword rankings

Who would NOT benefit from using Wirestock?

  • Contributors that already have a defined uploading and keywording workflow, particularly if already using a paid-account at Stocksubmitter
  • Stock footage contributors (for the time being)
  • Contributors that actually enjoy keywording (really, I’ve met a few crazies in my time!)

More info

– Explainer Video

– Recent article one of Wirestocks’s contributors wrote after switching from Unsplash (turds) to Wirestock.

– Can you still make money as a Photographer? By Ted Forbes

-Independent review:

I trust you’ve found the review useful and I hope you’ll take advantage of this excellent service!

About Alex

I’m an eccentric guy, currently based in Madrid, on a quest to visit all corners of the world and capture stock images & footage. I’ve devoted six years to making it as a travel photographer / videographer and freelance writer (however, had recently go back into full-time office work to make ends meet!). I hope to inspire others by showing an unique insight into a fascinating business model.

I’m proud to have written a book about my adventures which includes tips on making it as a stock travel photographer – Brutally Honest Guide to Microstock Photography

55 comments

  1. This sounds very interesting. I have been trying to find ways to minimize my time submitting to focus more on photography and writing. I do subscribe to Stocksubmitter, but if it eliminates keywordings, etc., it might be worth experimenting with.

    My problem right now it that 95% of my images that are ready for keywording and captioning will be editorial, so I may have to wait until they develop that side of the house.

    Thanks for the heads up!

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    • Hi Darryl,

      Ah yes in the case of editorials I don’t think there is value (as you have Stocksubmitter). Hope they roll out this feature soon and also looking forward to seeing if they will provide a service for keywording stock footage. Will keep you all up to date!

      All the best

      Alex

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  2. Yes, very interesting. I would really like to improve my prospects on Alamy and this could be a way to make use of their better ranking!

    Steve

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply

    • They were images I originally sent off to Arcangel with grain added that I forgot to re-export without the grain. I believe they would have accepted otherwise.

      No control over prices, nor control of who buys. Only control is which of the agencies we can opt out…such as iStock turds.

      All the best

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  4. Thanks for this great review. I must say i was skeptic at the beginning but it seems to be a really great platform. Submitted there 300 images all accepted and with no extra work available at 7 agencies. That’s what i call future for a busy parent with kids :).

    I noticed that the team from Wirestock are very friendly, helpful and professional.

    Thank you a lot Alex for bringing this up.

    Liked by 1 person

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  5. Well I was a little hasty with my enthusiasm for this new stock platform. I can’t even get past the welcome page! When sites do not work correctly I have no patience. I click on Start Tour – nothing. I then click on the only other option Skip and nothing there either. Not sure why this has happened but I will not waste my time.

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    • Having a lot of intermittent issues with this platform can’t delete images sometimes, easy submission stopped working, won’t even load now. So far a bit frustrating to use.

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    • Well I was a little hasty with my enthusiasm for this new stock platform. I can’t even get past the welcome page! When sites do not work correctly I have no patience. I click on Start Tour – nothing. I then click on the only other option Skip and nothing there either. Not sure why this has happened but I will not waste my time.

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  6. Hi Alex, Re Wirestock, am I correct believing they have 24,000 images on Shutterstock? If so, they must be way past the 500, 1000, 5000 dollar download contributor bonus. For example, would everyone, even new contributors, get 38cent instead 25cent (less 15%) even if they only have a few pictures, as Wirestock, with those numbers, must be at the top tier of the payment scale? That aside, thanks for a great blog, people like yourself, Steve Heap and Glenn Nagle who are successful stock submitters and share not just their earnings but so many helpful tips and are such an encouragement to so many of us who like me, work alone.
    Best of luck with your travels, ‘All who wander are not lost’ Tolkien. Here are a few of my own travel shots:
    https://www.shutterstock.com/g/oldbear?rid=280156

    Liked by 2 people

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    • Thanks Robert for your comments and encouragement!

      Your images look great on thumbnails, I like your style! I see you’ve spent a lot of time in Vancouver…such a beautiful city and have great memories.

      As for the Wirestock’s top-tier on SS, that’s a great point. It effectively means that the 15% commission is irrelevant so contributors would earn considerably more (at least in the first years or so) than if they had started out at the 25cent scale. Interesting. I’ll update the blog post. Another plus for them.

      All the best and wishing you great travels.

      Alex

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

  7. Thanks Alex for the great review. I have signed up to this service as well, but it seems that the image acceptance and review process takes a very long time (more than one week). I hope they can solve this problem soon. Some of my images were accepted but I cannot see them on the stock sites yet. So i think there is a second layer of review/processing, which adds even more time. It’ll be interesting to see your experience with the site after using it for some time.

    Liked by 1 person

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  8. When signing up and it ask you what agency’s do you want to sell on – it states that if you currently sell on one of the agency’s you may not be able to use it.

    Is this a warning to not upload the same photo both places? Or bc I have been using shutter stock I should not use it on Wirestock?

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  10. This looks quite interesting, especially getting to the top tier immediately and may be a way of staying with Shutterstock. It would certainly free up time for more actual shooting. I wonder what happens to the Alamy DACS payments though. Thanks for the info Alex.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    • You’re welcome, Joe. Happy you found the information useful. Good question about DACS payment via Wirestock…I’m not sure.

      I would suggest to upload separately to Alamy than Wirestock for the reason that some specialist subjects are better off with contributors inserting the caption/keywording. It’s too much to ask that Wirestock do it…they’ve certainly improved in the past months but I think that they are still generalist keyworders.

      All the best,

      Alex

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  11. It’s a very interesting new agency, thanks for the review, very useful.
    I’d like to note that your referral link doesn’t work. I tried to use it with different browsers and even on mobile and it says, page not found.

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  12. Thanks for sharing this useful info. I submitted 50 photos to them. The review process takes about a week because of large number of submitted photos. My question here: when you submitted your 50 photos to them and then they submitted to the agencies, under who’s name? Theirs or yours?

    Liked by 1 person

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  13. I went out shooting on saturday, the weather was lovely here in the UK. I checked it an hour ago, some of my pictures are already on shutterstock. It took them only two days, amazing. Nice description, keywords, better than what I could do on my own. They even recognize what flower is on the picture. I would spend ages with this.

    The negative side is that their server seems to have trouble. (Probably a lot of people decided to be a professional photographer during the pandemic) I spent hours to upload around 600 photos because I couldn’t use the ftp, or it randomly stoped uploading, duplicated pictures, some were missing etc…

    But overall I’m very happy with them. They are strict about quality as I see it, rejected around 10% of my photos but they weren’t my best photos so to say. And even if it’s a little bit of a pain to upload large number of photos I think they’re worth the trouble.

    Thank you for the recommendation.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    • Thanks for sharing your experiences, Vapour.

      I have a good feeling about Wirestock. They’ve improved immensely with their keywording from 8 months ago to the present and have taken on board many of the feedback myself and other contributors have provided.

      FTP is something that they will start implementing soon, although that doesn’t help to recover your many hours on that large submission!

      Best of luck with sales – Alex

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  14. Thanks Vapour for the reply. Btw, fyi, there is no IStock on their list, instead is 123RF. I think for newbies who try to build up their portfolios by increasing the numbers of photos, Wirestock may not suit them.

    Liked by 1 person

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  15. I’ve been using wirestock for a couple of months now. Have a good range of nearly 300 photos. Mainly food for some model and some travel photos. In the Over 2 months I’ve been in I’ve had 1 sale. This seems a lot less than if I uploaded myself, I’ve only 30 images on adobe stock get get 1-2 sales a month.does anyone else find this?

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  18. Hi Alex. Enjoyed the article and this looks great for me. I already have images on Alamy and Shutterstock but hate the keywording! One question I have though regards the tagging of all images under the Wirestock name. As a buyer, in the current climate, if I saw an image on Alamy at saw $10, would it not be tempting to check out Shutterstock and buy it for less than a 10th of that?

    Still like the idea of aggregating my small earnings to receive a more regular income.

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  19. Thanks Alex, that gives me some reassurance although I’m not totally convinced!

    On another point, when reading your article you mentioned that it was useful that Wirestock put the scientific name of the Chrysanthemum in the keywords and title of the image but looking at the image it would seem to be a Dahlia. (but I could be wrong)

    This observation was reinforced when I started to look around on Shutterstock for an image of a Herring Gull. My search included images accredited to Wirestock that were not of a Herring Gull, but a different gull altogether, red legs and red bill instead of grey/brown and yellow. A Tufted duck described as a Goldeneye and a Silkmoth described as a Silkworm. There were also numerous keywords that didn’t relate to the images, but could have related to the batch.

    I appreciate that this may be down to the submitter rather than Wirestock and I note your previous comment about their keywording improving but again, something to keep an eye on.

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  20. I have over 400 in my port with Wirestock and they are offering their Instant Pay Program. Has anyone had any experience with this program?

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  21. Hey, thanks for the article about Wirestock. I started uploading a few weeks ago and for the most pictures it took really a Longfellow time to be inspected. Also the keywording is not always correct. Is there a possibility to change it later on?
    But my most important question is, that I found one of my picture s on Dreamtimes for free. I didn’t got any information about that ? Does that happen regularly?

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  22. I just got a small patch of images completely rejected. They rejected even more than Shutterstock! All stated the same reason: “Noise /Artifacts / Film Grain: Image contains excessive noise, film grain, compression artifacts, and/or posterization.”
    I guess they are really strict on their standards.

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  23. Seems a cool site and thanks Article Alex! I just joined! I am with several agencies but have not uploaded to a couple of them which Wirestock has on their list. I found it very easy to use but I have had an issue when choosing two stock sites to submit to and then finding out they have been submitted to all the sites. So I have had to delete them. This was very annoying as a few of the batch I submitted at once did as I asked and only included the two sites but the rest was all of them. As you are only allowed to submit 100 in the beginning Wirestock included the deleted ones in the 100 which now limits my submissions to only a few. I will now have to wait and see if my remaining submissions make the 70% to lift the limit on submissions.

    Liked by 1 person

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  24. thanks for the article. I joined wirestock about a year ago now and have 500 or so images with them. What disturbs me now about WS is the “instant pay’ where they upload some of your images to “freepik”. While the $100 or so dollars I have earned through instant pay is ok, what I don’t like is that those images are now available to anyone anywhere totally free of charge. There seems to be no way of choosing if you want a particular image in instant pay or not.

    Liked by 1 person

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    • That’s true and a factor in deciding whether to upload to them or not. So far I’m very happy with them as I can’t be bothered to keyword commercial images for 10cents, etc and they do the work for me., thus saving me a lot of time

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  25. What I now about Wirestock is, they don’t check content that members provide, there is bunch of stolen content in their portfolios. Key-wording showed in article is bad, because it is in alphabetical order, same service is available on many places online, and is one of worst type of key-wording. 15% on already high commissions on websites is a rip off, most of their members hardly earn anything, because they have small number of content. Many members already have portfolios on all those sites. If you want to earn in stock, upload by yourself for yourself, learn best way of adding tags, learn what is sold on such sites. Like this only Wirestock really earns, and all of you get scraps.

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  26. I typically key word my own images and upload to the sites I want. It seems to me that it might be a good idea to upload to Shutterstock via Wirestock to take advantage of the contributor levels + Alamy for the reasons referred to above but then upload independently to Adobe Stock, etc. No reason why you have to pay that 15% if there is no advantage (other than time savings). How is my thinking flawed? Please burst my bubble.

    Liked by 1 person

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    • Hi Jeff,

      Uploading to SS via Wirestock does make sense as they reach the top-tier within a few weeks at the beginning of the year. Whereas for Alamy it doesn’t make so much sense as there’s no extra benefit…as well as AS.

      If you have the time and don’t mind keywording it makes perfect sense to upload directly. I do it often with Alamy subjects as they tend to be quite specialist and although Wirestock do a good job at captioning/keywording, I prefer to do it on my own.

      All the best

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  27. HI , I have uploaded around 300 images which are accepted. Good so far, but their Support team is very pathetic and dont respond back to quires, which is very Discouraging.

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