Free Software For Selling Photography Online
Dreamstime
Sell photos with LightBurner.com – new FREE online microstock content distribution service
Dec 8th
I am glad to invite you to try LightBurner Beta, our new free microstock content distribution and analytical service.
LightBurner customers can submit images to the following pre-integrated microstock photography agencies:

Microstock Photography Agencies Supported by LightBurner
Also you can define unlimited Custom FTP Channels, delivering your images wherever you want to, for instance your blog’ FTP server or your backup FTP site.
I plan to have at least 20-25 pre-integrated microstocks supported in December yet. Your suggestions for more destination are warmly welcome.
The famous keywords suggestions + translations, first introduced in ProStockMaster in 2006 (wow, 4 years ago – who can believe it), is now a part of LightBurner too.
Other interesting features include built-in search in your portfolio, Similar Media area, cataloging by Lightboxes, Folders and Categories, notes on images and sales balance for each channel. Of course, LightBurner reads IPTC for any uploaded JPEG, so you get your files with all the metadata – searchable and cataloged, at your fingertips.
The service is still far from being completed, however I believe that existing functions work quite well and have a great value to any microstock contributor. More agencies and more features will come in the next weeks. Without getting into the details, you can expect nice surprises in your LightBurner account.
How to get started
- register for a free account. In a few moments you will get a Welcome email with your credentials, including SFTP access.
- upload your files by SFTP (FileZilla will do)
- login and go to My Account -> My Portfolio -> Channels/Edit and select your sales channels / agencies
- select what files go where. Multiple options available, including “Assign” X files to Y channels, “Edit” of multiple files or simple drag-n-drop a file to a channel
Actually, that’s it. The distribution is automatic, so you do not have to do a thing.
Your files statuses are updated accordingly: red square (undistributed) is replaced by yellow (partially distributed) and then by green (fully distributed). You will have to hit Refresh from time to time to see these statuses changes.
A few notes:
- All the original uploaded files are removed after 3 days
- Shutterstock delivery is over FTP, stats / balance can not be displayed due to submitters accounts blocking with a captcha
- At the moment LightBurner supports JPEGs only, no other formats and no model releases
- Later on ProStockMaster will work directly with your LightBurner account, thus saving you traffic, costs and time by uploading media just once
- The last but not the least: bugs happen. Please be patient, and report them! Contact: support(at)pixamba.com, david(at)pixamba.com or via LightBurner’ online form
iStockphoto.com Security And The Latest Physhing Attack
Mar 9th
I guess most of you already saw this message when logged in to iStockphoto:
March 3, 2009 20:10
This afternoon a phishing attack was conducted in the forums and through sitemail. This attack created a fake istockphoto.com login screen, prompted the user for a username & password, saved them to a malicious server, then redirected the user back to the iStockphoto main page
The iStock forums post by the same author says:
It’s an interesting statement, where the first part is correct, while the second part is very confusing. No financial information to breach, oh yeah, really?
Just a week ago Dreamstime complained in this thread that “we had cases when contributors had their accounts accessed, password changed, payment requested”. Now the iStockphoto guys are brave enough to say us they have “no financial information to breach”?
We all know that iStockphoto, like any other stock photo agency has on file your PayPal / MoneyBookers accounts. They also collect funds that have to be transferred to contributors monthly. Should not this stuff be considered as a valuable financial information stored by iStock? And if it is not enough, add here you personal profile details like your home address, phones and your picture ID. And even your images portfolio is in danger since it can be first completely downloaded and stolen and then, just for fun, completely removed from the agency by a hacker who looks for an entertainment on the hacked site.
What happened to iStock on March 3 is not funny at all. And it is a much more serious issue than just a few hours of iStock down time, even if iStockphoto prefers to present it this way. The site stores financial information and digital goods that can be stolen, so their “no financial info stored” statement is very far from the reality.
Uploading stock photos to Dreamstime microstock switched to FTP
Mar 6th
This releases switches uploading stock photos to Dreamstime to FTP and fixes a small issue which recently stopped Canstockphoto microstock uploads. There is no change in your Canstock workflow, but for the Dreamstime microstock site you have to add your FTP credentials.
In order to do that, please login to Dreamstime web and go to
http://www.dreamstime.com/ftpupload.php
At the right part of the page you will see text similar to this:

When you open Dreamstime credentials dialog in PSM v1.6.1 (“Upload->Stock Agnecies” menu in PSM, click on the checkbutton next to Dreamstime name), the follow window opens:

Note that ProStockMaster already fills in for you the Dreamstime FTP server name and the correct server’ FTP port, as well as takes care of entering Passive FTP mode when connected to Dreamstime FTP server. So the only two FTP parameters that you still have to provide are your FTP user ID from the Dreamstime web (see the image above) and your FTP password.
For Dreamstime, your FTP password is identical to your web password (please verify that your personal FTP details on Dreamstime web confirm that).
All you have to do to activate your FTP uploads to Dreamstime is copying your FTP user ID from Dreamstime web page directly to ProStockMaster GUI (you can use CTRL-C/CTRL-V keyboards sequences for bullet-proof Copy/Paste) and providing PSM with your FTP password (which seems to be the same like your web password).
You will still need to provide your web credentials in the top form of PSM GUI in order to get your Dreamstime stock photos sales statistics through PSM HTTP connection.
Let’s see what else was added in v1.6.1.
This version sports 25 more languages in keywords translations, so together with previously introduced 23 most popular languages PSM is now capable of translating your keywords from 48 different languages.
In addition to the West European and North American languages set, we support now most East European languages (e.g. Hungarian, Slovak, Slovenian, Ukrainian) , accomplished by a nice selection of Asian languages like Turkish, Thai and Uzbek. We keep our target in mind: photographers should be able to describe their creations using their own words in their native language. We at ProStockMaster try to help them with this target, taking care of all the rest of the dirty and time consuming images keywording work.
Note, that ProStockMaster inserts your keywords directly into the IPTC segment of your image, thus never touching your pixels. Unfortunately, not all the applications available on the market today behave in the same way.
For instance, if you use such a high-quality and high-performance tool like Adobe Photoshop to edit image’ metadata each time opening your JPEG stock image, modifying keywords and closing the file back you can end up with a stock photograph of significantly lower quality than your original. Each time you use Photoshop to edit anything in your stock photos in JPG format, Photoshop decompress JPG to be represented as bitmap RGB data. When you are done with your modifications and save a JPEG file Photoshop re-compresses the data again and saves it as JPG file. Since JPEG is a lossy compression your stock photos actually lose pixels!
Thus, such a simple and intuitive Photoshop “Open a JPEG -> add-metadata-with-File_Info -> Save JPEG & Close” flow of operations becomes unsafe in terms of the image quality. Doing such modifications frequently on a certain file you can easily end up with visual artifacts and other image quality degradation results. If you want to stick with modifying your images metadata with Photoshop you better switch to the safe RAW-based workflow where no de/re-compression applies.
Alternatively, you can use ProStockMaster microstock software, which combines the convenience of multilingual translations, keywords suggestions and multi-agencies uploads for your stock photos. All that without touching a single pixel in your valued artwork.
Stock photography software adds Alamy and StockXpert
Nov 25th
New v1.4.0 is here!
It brings you two new agencies:
1. Alamy, the first traditional royalty free and rights managed stock photography agency which we decided to include. Meanwhile we have implemented the uploads only, however we plan to extend Alamy support in further releases.
2. The long-awaited (and millions times requested) Stockxpert! Many thanks to Steve Kapsinow from Stockxpert for his valued help.
Upload issues with Dreamstime and 123rf reported in my previous post are also fixed in this version.
Our list of supported stock photos sites reaches for the first time a two-digits number: there are 10 supported microstock agencies on the list now. It’s a nice milestone.



















