It is just too much work now. Surely there has to be an easier way?

I am a casual stock contributor. I do mostly 4K nature wildlife footage shot on professional Sony cameras and lenses. This is my hobby, and I post only my best footage online as stock. Just to earn a little. I was in a bad car wreck about a year ago, and was seriously injured with many broken bones. I am still recovering, and not yet able to get out with my camera yet, but I wanted to put some of my previous footage online.

When I last uploaded stock, I used one simple program called StockSubmitter. After I edited and rendered the clip in Davinci Resolve, I used to be able to use StockSubmiter to do everything else: SEO the clip, upload the clip, and submit the clip. I did the SEO work once, and it worked for all the agencies I submit to. I click one button, and it goes to them all. Boom, done.

However, Stocksubmitter does not work anymore and is pretty much abandoned. I can still do SEO (not well though), but not much more. I have tried several other apps like Xpiks, ImsStocker, etc, but these are either useless or just a freemium app where all truly useful functions are locked behind a paywall.

The reality is, I do not really make a lot of money from this, and spending large amounts of time trying to get my clips online is really not reasonable. It is not that I am not willing to pay for an app, but most paid apps don't have a tier for a casual contributor like me. I would be going into debt to use them to upload and may never make enough to compensate for just the price of using them.

I just don't understand why everything is so hard now. I feel like the stock agencies are actively fighting against their own contributors, like we are the enemy. I have tried and tried to search for a solution, but the only message I am getting is that I have to do everything manually on each agency, or use a mishmash of apps for SEO and upload, and then I still have to export and sideload the seo on the agency itself. This is an insane amount of work, for something that may never sell, and will earn very little if it does.

Don't the stock agencies realize that the ROI is very low, and that if they make it so difficult to get content on them that it is not worth it anymore?

How many agencies do you submit footage to?

I submit to 2. I find using FTP for batch uploading and doing the metadata separately on each platform is not that bad.

I upload to five. SS, AS, DT, GT, & P5. SS and AS are my primary agencies. I started with GT and P5 last year and only upload newer content. I have about a 100 videos on both so far.

Mail me my team will some help you

Try downloading the free version is the Ai app Claude, now I have very little experience with Ai but just using the basic chat function I was able to get Claude to do some things for me and then I copy/paste into the stock site template, I tried this last week to update the templates on some of my old editorial clips.

Some of the prompts I used in Claude were just as if I was talking or texting a human and Claude already knows all about these stock websites and what they need.

For example here's a few prompts I wrote and then copy/pasted the results into the template.

Write me 49 keywords to describe editorial stock footage of a massive blizzard with cars and people stranded in Ontario 8 years ago that I've uploaded to Pond5

Write me a description for this same blizzard stock footage but keep it under 500 characters.

Write me a title for the same editorial stock footage.

Took 60 seconds for Claude to complete each task and then I was good to copy and past.