Doing it once is hard enough

I used to come home from a trip and decide when I was going to upload. Not whether, when. Writing the titles, the descriptions and the tags took long enough that it became a thing to schedule around, and a backlog is a strange thing to have when the hard part is already done.

The work nobody mentions

Every asset needs a title, a description and a set of keywords before a buyer can find it. Every single one. Not the good ones, not the ones you are proud of. All of them.

Doing that once, for one marketplace, is already the job. It is slow, it is repetitive, and it is the opposite of why anyone picks up a camera.

And then it is not once

Marketplaces do not describe things the same way. The words that make an asset findable on one site are not the words that make it findable on another, so the work you just finished does not carry over. You do it again, differently, for each place you file to.

Multiply that by everything you shot on a trip. That is why most contributors pick one site and quietly give up on the rest.

What I do now

I shoot, I export, and I run MetaMule over the folder. Photos and video, the same pass.

It looks at each asset and writes the title, the description and the keywords in the vocabulary each marketplace actually uses. It checks the technical specs, keeps track of releases, and produces the upload file each site wants.

I built it with Devin Supertramp, because it was our problem before it was a product.

The difference is not subtle. A weekend that used to get me twenty videos out the door now gets me two hundred.

Editing still needs me, and I would not want it any other way. Choosing what is worth uploading, cutting it, grading it, that is the part I actually do. The filing is the part I was never going to get better at.

Why it matters more than it sounds

Because being found is most of the game. Across my own statements the pattern is hard to argue with: a small number of assets carry most of the royalties, and a video earns several times what a still does per sale.

None of that is decided by how good the shot is. It is decided by whether the right buyer ever saw it.