November 2025 Update:
Wirestock powers next-generation AI with high-quality, ethically sourced creative data. By working with a global community of contributors, we provide vetted multimodal datasets from images and video to design, music, and 3D content. AI teams can choose ready-to-use collections or request custom datasets tailored to their training goals. Built on transparency and creator empowerment, Wirestock ensures contributors are fairly compensated while delivering legitimate, reliable data for industry leading AI models.
Original post from 2020:
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!
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).
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:
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.
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.
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:
Example 2:
Example 3:
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
– 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
Alexandre Rotenberg's Brutally Honest Guide to Stock Photography & Footage 
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