Every now and then, someone asks "what’s the minimum I can do, caption-wise, and still sell imagery online?" Well, statistics indicate that even a name in the caption field goes a long way towards keeping the ball rolling.

But... if we can’t convince you to mark up your files for the convenience of your online customers, expect us to continue to try to convince you to do it for yourselves. Because plainly stated, if you can’t find it again, you can’t use it again, and it’s just wasting space on a hard drive somewhere. A hard drive that you paid for, in all probability.

OK, here’s the deal: at a bare minimum - to upload photos, we need:

Source Field - (in Photoshop, it’s under the "Origin" tab) - it’s case sensitive and specific to your publication - if you don’t know yours, please ask. Our lawyers insisted on this test (and most of your lawyers did too) - it prevents you from uploading photos you don’t own. Photos that fail this test, depending on your site’s configuration, will either be moved to the "checkfail" folders or left standing in your import directory.

Caption Field - without at least a name, readers won’t be able to find themselves - the more information, the better. Readers often search for words in the published caption, so having the actual caption info that was published can be helpful.

That’s it. Without the first item, you can’t upload it and without the second, you won’t sell it.

Of course, we’d STRONGLY urge you to add keywords and a category - either the IPTC standards or even your own consistently-applied method. This allows you to create links for different kinds of work (sports photos, for example) and adds value to your archived assets.

You can always go back and edit the file information on the site itself, but in general, we recommend you make any metadata changes further back in the process, where it’s easier to do quickly. Questions? Ask away.