Re-Uploading Images
Posted on 10/5/2017 by Jim Pickerell | Printable Version |
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Have your images that sold a year or two ago sold again recently? If not, it may be because the images are now buried so deep in the search return order that customers no longer see them.
Rather than spending time shooting more new images, it may be worthwhile to spend some time re-uploading the ones that sold previously to the site that originally licensed their use, or to multiple new sites. Before uploading, it may also be worthwhile to take another look at the keywords and consider whether adding a few might increase the chances of new sales.
Of course the first thing you should do is delete the image from a site before uploading it to that same site again. Some sites will not allow photographer to delete images which could make this strategy impractical. It is probably not advisable to have the same image with the same keywords on a site twice.
More and more images are being added to all the major sites and certainly older images that have sold only a few times, or never at all, are very quickly pushed down in the search return order. Most customers won’t look at more than 500 of the thumbnails returned in a search, and certainly not more than 1,000. If your image is not in that group it is not being seen. Certainly, in any search algorithm a percentage of newly uploaded images and a percentage of best sellers are being pushed to the top. If your images can get a new upload date then they may be seen again.
I know of one photographer who had some images that were good sellers in 2006 and 2007, but hadn’t sold in several years. In 2015 he re-uploaded them and they started selling again.
This is an activity that could be assigned to an assistant and not require a lot of the photographer’s time. Simply track images that sold a few years ago and see if they have been licensed recently. If not, delete them from the database and re-upload them. Your assistant might want to do some searches for the images before deleting them and see if they appear high in the search return order.
Something to think about.
Copyright © 2017
Jim Pickerell.
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