As the global microstock industry has been demonstrating a rapid growth, it has become a real challenge for a contributor to succeed and keep up with the market pace. A microstock contributor has to produce quality content and they have to do it quickly. What they also have to do is to be careful and accurate preparing their images for submitting (attributing and categorising).

When working as a microstock contributor you devote a great deal of your time and effort to attributing, uploading and then categorising your content. That tasks often take more time to be performed than content production itself. Besides attributing and uploading work is so time-consuming  that, as a rule, a contributor cooperates with only 3-5 leading agencies and thus cannot increase the scale of the portfolio distribution. To contribute to 10 or more agencies until recently was possible only if you did not have too many images, not more than 10 per day, for instance, which could be prepared and then submitted manually. However, if you want to upload 50 or 100 images per day to 15 agencies simultaneously? What’s then?

Fortunately, now a special tool for a contributor exists which can help with all attributing and uploading work and considerably increase the effectiveness of your business and ROI of your portfolio. This summer Octopus Microstock software was released to the market with the aim to automate a contributor’s work. Octopus Microstock offers an opportunity to increase sales of your portfolio and get more time to produce more content due to its great functionality. Octopus Microstock allows you to attribute and categorize your images once and through a single interface and then submit them to multiple stock agencies simultaneously without visiting agencies’ sites. Currently Octopus supports 16 stock agencies with 10 more coming soon this year.

Apart from its primary function of attributing, categorising and submitting images, Octopus provides a number of services which can considerably save your time and enhance quality and productivity of your work. Octopus Microstock allows you:

- to work with images metadata, that is to provide title and image descriptions, to select key words with its built-in keywords search engine, to check spelling and control number of words, to control repetition and prohibited words usage. For those who work with large numbers of images Octopus Microstock supports a convenient template service and “copy and paste” functionality.

- to categorise your images and attach model releases to them. Octopus microstock contains more than 1000 categories that allows it to describe every image with maximum detail and then find highly relevant categories on every agency when images are being automatically submitted.

- to create virtual packages for uploading and submitting without physically moving files stored on the computer. Image files can be stored in any order you choose on your computer (based on creation date, models participated, theme, etc.) while virtually included to different upload and submit packages in order to provide variety within (heterogeneity of) the content submitted.

- to upload your files via third parties FTP, such as FileZilla and others, and thus to facilitate high volume uploads.

- to schedule certain time of uploading and submitting of your files.

In addition to its wide functionality Octopus Microstock has user- friendly interface, supports convenient drag-&-drop technology and hot key functions, indicates files statuses and degree of their readiness for uploading, allows to apply different filters and group your files on various bases.

With Octopus Microstock you can sell your portfolio through multiple stock agencies and thus increase your sales, your profits and effectiveness of your work. You will also have more time to devote it to creativity and production work. Octopus Microstock will be soon an indispensable tool for a successful and competitive contributor in the nearest future.

You can learn more about Octopus microstock and download its free version on www.octopusmicrostock.com.

We wish you success and growth with Octopus Microstock.