Tagging & Pricing Your Files

To edit your uploads, log in to your account, go to your dashboard, and click on “UPLOADS.”

You’ll find an “EDIT” button next to each item you’ve uploaded. Clicking this will take you to the “Edit Item” page, where you can update your metadata (see fields below for each media type). You can also update the title, description, keywords and price from “My Uploads” by clicking on each of these fields.

Footage metadata

• • • Title (required)
    • Description (optional)
    • Keywords (required)
    • Camera model or software used (optional)
    • Date Created (optional)
    • Location City (optional)
    • Country (optional)
    • Image Credit (optional) – name of artist/copyright owner
    • Pricing (required)

Adding Titles

In the “Title” field, enter a precise and descriptive title, 40-80 characters long, in English. (e.g. “African Oystercatcher Bird Feeding in Estuary, Eats Worm, 4K”).

If you’re adding a title for editorial content, please use the following format:
CITY, COUNTRY – MONTH/DAY/YEAR: Factual description of the image content (e.g. “PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC – 05/11/2017: Runners at Prague City Half Marathon”). Then scroll down to “Curator Notes” and leave a note for the curator indicating that the clip should be marked Editorial Use Only.

Setting Your Price

You have the freedom to set your own prices for your media, and you’ll earn an industry-leading commission on all sales.

If you’re unsure about how to price your files, you can change the Pricing Method to “LET POND5 SET MY PRICE” and we’ll take care of it for you. You can always change the prices later on if you want to experiment with different price points.

Selecting Keywords

You can add up to 50 keywords to describe each uploaded file (the minimum is 5), but you’ll reach the best level of performance with 10-20 descriptive and precise keywords. Type in a search word to add a keyword and select it from the drop-down menu or hit “Enter” to add it.

Using Auto-Tagging

Pond5 uses image-recognition software that can generate keywords automatically for your uploaded media. Please review all auto-generated keywords and remove any that don’t apply.

Note: You can disable Automatically Suggested Keywords on your Preferences page.

Good titles are an incredibly effective means of gaining traffic to your content, and thus, a great way of increasing your sales. In order to get the most of your titles and to have your items approved, follow these tips:

• Use descriptive titles. Giving your content engaging, unique, descriptive titles greatly improves the likelihood of it being seen. For example, the title “African Oystercatcher Bird Feeding in Estuary, Eats Worm, 4K” identifies the precise species of animal, the activity that it’s engaged in, where the footage was shot, and the quality of the footage. This is much more enticing, interesting, and unique than a video simply titled “Bird in the Water,” which would get far less traffic.
• Each item should have a unique title. We understand that this can be difficult with a lot of items showing the same content, but slight variances and using synonyms will allow more content to stand out in the search results.
• Be precise. Keep it readable, concise, and to the point.
• Stick to the ideal length. This is 40-60 characters (maximum is 80 characters).
• Use English language titles. Follow this rule unless you’re referring to particular places or objects with names that are more likely to be searched for in their native language.
• Editorial video/photo titles need an editorial caption. The format for this is: CITY, COUNTRY – MONTH/DAY/YEAR: Factual description of the image content.

Things to avoid:

• Do not use any number codes in your titles. You can keep track of your items in the My Uploads area under the “Tech Data” tab, so numbering clips for personal reference are not necessary. (Example of incorrect titles: Pink Flamingo 001, Pink Flamingo 002, etc.)
• Do not use file extensions. These include .mov or .jpg and should not be a part of your titles.
• Do not repeat one word several times. This does not help your items in the search results; in fact, it does the opposite.
• Spelling mistakes. We are not spellchecking your title, description, and keywords (yet), so please make sure your spelling is correct. A simple, free spellchecking tool like Grammarly can work wonders.

Keywords are words that are used as identifiers or labels for your media files. You can add up to 50 keywords to describe each uploaded file. The better you keyword your files with useful information, the easier it is for buyers to find and purchase them. The minimum is 5 keywords, but you’ll reach the best performance with 10-20 descriptive keywords.

Don’t use “spam” keywords hoping for better search results, as irrelevant tags will damage your clip performance. Trying to game the system by filling your keywords or clip titles with popular search terms unrelated to your media will actually cause your files to sink in the search ranking.

Model and property releases are required for all media to be sold as cleared for commercial use. Model and/or property releases may not be necessary for media intended for editorial use (see below).

Model Release

• Required for each recognizable individual
• Required for recognizable voices
• Must include a recognizable photo of the model that is not a frame grab of the model from the item submission itself

Property Release

• Required if a recognizable landmark, building, or property appears in the work
• Required if copyrighted music/sounds are in an audio track
• Required if media contains trademarks, logos, or brands

You can find our standard Model Release here and our Property Release here. It is not required that you use our releases for the media you upload, but if you use a different release, it must contain essentially the same information.

Acceptable formats of signed releases:

• JPG
• PDF
• DOC
• TIF

Note: Release files must be at least 5KB in size.

There are 2 steps in assuring you have appropriate releases on Pond5 – upload your release and attach the release you uploaded to your media.

Uploading Releases Via Browser

• Log into your account > Hover cursor over account avatar > Click on Uploads > Releases

Uploading Releases Via FTP

• Log into the FTP as you normally would when you upload media.
• Create a root directory releases, if you do not see one already there already

• Drag and drop your release files inside the HTML5 uploader area or inside the releases folder of the FTP.

Release files are usually small file sizes, so the upload will finish almost instantly.

After you’ve uploaded the attachments, they will hover in your FTP releases folder for typically 2-10 minutes, depending on the FTP server load.

When the upload is finished, you should see the files that uploaded successfully in your Releases page.

Attaching Releases To Files

When your releases are uploaded and registered by the database, you can then attach them to your files.

• Log into your account > Hover cursor over account avatar  > Click on Uploads
• Select the file the release will be applied to
• Scroll down to Actions:
• Choose attach release from the drop-down
• Select the corresponding release from the drop-down menu
  • If your list of releases is too long to scroll through in the drop-down, simply type the first few letters of the release filename in the Filter field and hit Update. Then select the relevant release file from the drop-down menu and
• Click Execute
• A pop-up confirmation window will appear if the attachment of your release file(s) is successful

Checking Attached Releases

You can verify how many releases are attached to your clip(s) by refreshing the Uploads page.

• Find Clip Details tab
• Under the Attachments column the number next to the attachment icon indicates how many releases have been associated with your clip.
• To check which release is attached to a specific clip, hover cursor over the number next to attachment icon and click. A list of the release filenames will display.

You have the freedom to set your own prices for your media, and you’ll earn an industry-leading commission on all sales.

For pricing recommendations, please visit our Data & Trends section.

If you prefer that Pond5 handle your pricing, you can change the Pricing Method on your Uploads page to “LET POND5 SET MY PRICE” and we’ll price your content to optimize sales.

When you get a sale, we will notify you via email, and once your balance reaches the payout limit, we will issue payment via the payout method selected in your account. Payouts are processed on the 15th of every month.

Best Practices:

We recommend that once you set a price for your content and start making sales, to keep your content at the original price you’ve set. Our data shows that increasing your price after making sales actually lessens the chance to make repeat sales.

If you are a Non-Exclusive video contributor, we ask that you abide by the guidelines in our Contributor Agreement and not price your content higher than the standard market rate on competing marketplaces ($79 for HD and $179 for 4K).

To set the thumbnail for your file, select the media file(s) to modify on your Uploads page by checking the box(es).

From the Actions dropdown, select Change Thumbnail

From the lightbox, select the desired imaged and hit Submit

OR

From the edit item page find the Thumbnail section and click on the image desired.

When you are finished with your edits, click Save or Save And Submit For Review.

Note: It might take up to 24 hours for you to see actual changes on the site due to caching.

Saving Changes and Submitting for Review

Once all of the information is added to your file on the “Edit Item” page, you can save it and send it to our curators for review.

• If you only want to save your edits and send your item for review later on, just click “SAVE CHANGES.”
• If you want to save your edits and send your item for review right away, click “SAVE AND SUBMIT FOR REVIEW.”

Note: If your edits will not save or you receive an error, you may be missing a required field. Please make sure that all the required fields are filled in.

To send multiple items for a review in a batch:

Go to My Uploads page and mark all the items you want to send for review, then scroll down to “Actions” at the bottom of the page, choose “SUBMIT” and click “EXECUTE”.

Once you’ve sent your media for review, the status of your upload will change to “Pending Review”.

Your file is then added to our curator queue for review. Our review system sorts uploads by order of submission. Please give our curators time to carefully review your uploads. Review time may vary depending on media type, the size of your submission, and the number of submissions ahead of you.

After your submission has been reviewed, you’ll receive an email with information on the curation results. Your files will be either accepted, returned to you for edits, or rejected with an explanation as to why. You can also find these details on your Uploads page next to each item, and use filters to sort by different statuses.

Note: It may take up to 24 hours to see your accepted files online in the Pond5 marketplace.

Rejected Files

Our curators base their assessment of files on many different factors. For example, our curators may decide that the content is too low-quality, or that our library already has too many similar files. You will always receive a message from our curators regarding the reason for any rejected files.

If you feel like your files have been rejected for an improper reason, please contact us at support@pond5.com and include file ID numbers so we can look into the specific files in question.

For more information on any of the topics covered in this post, contact Customer Support at support@pond5.com.

CSV stands for “Comma Separated Value”. It’s essentially a text file, but you can use any spreadsheet editor – including Excel, OpenOffice, or Google Docs to edit it.

Download the CSV file.

You can download a CSV file listing all your uploaded items.

Log into your account > Hover cursor over account avatar  > Click on Uploads > APPLY CSV

Click on “Apply CSV”.

Identify the type of media you are working with, click the corresponding tab and click Download CSV.

When you click the Download CSV button, a file with an extension .csv will be downloaded to your computer. This is essentially a text file but you can use Excel or the free OpenOffice to work on the data in a spreadsheet mode which is a much simpler way to work with mass data.

CSV files allow you to add metadata to multiple uploads with one master file, saving a significant amount of time. CSV stands for “Comma Separated Value,” and these are essentially text files. You can use any spreadsheet editor, including Excel, OpenOffice, or Google Docs to edit them.

You can start from a blank file if you want to prepare your metadata before the actual upload of your media to Pond5. Just download our CSV template here.

If you open the downloaded .csv file in OpenOffice, it will most likely look like a compressed text file with one file per row (1 clip, 1 audio file, etc.) separated by commas. To fix this view:

• Select all the data by clicking on the column mark (e.g. Column A) and go to the top menu. Select “DATA,” then “TEXT TO COLUMNS.” This will pull up a wizard window.
• Ensure DELIMITED is marked and click “NEXT”
• Select “COMMA” and click “FINISH”

The spreadsheet is laid out so that the first row is the header/name of the data fields you want to adjust; these column names are completely case insensitive. The remaining rows are one row of data per clip.

Fill the spreadsheet with all/some of the following data:

• OriginalFilename – This is the filename your file was uploaded as (with file extension)
• Title – Add a descriptive title with an 80 character limit
• Description – Add a description with a 200 character limit
• Keywords – Add 10-50 accurate and relevant keywords, separated by commas
• City, Country – Tell us where was the footage shot
• Release – State the filename of a release that you have already uploaded on Pond5, with extension separated by commas
• Specifysource – Specify camera model
• Setpriceforme – Write 1 if you want our curators to set the price for you; otherwise, leave the cell empty
• Price – Set the price for the original size/file in US$
• Pricelarge – A 4K file will be automatically downconverted to a HD version. Here, you can set the price for this HD version if you don’t want to use the auto-pricing function
• Copyright – State the copyright owner

Note: Mandatory fields for CSVs are Originalfilename, Title, and Keywords. All other fields are optional.

The general recommendation is to delete from your CSV file all of the columns and rows you are not planning to update and keep the file slim. This will help to avoid errors caused by shifted columns/rows.

Keep a copy of your originally downloaded, unmodified CSV file saved on your computer in case your modifications are not recognized. That way you can simply use the original file to restore the data as it was initially.

When saving a modified CSV file, it’s important to pay attention to how it’s saved. To save a spreadsheet as a CSV using OpenOffice:

• Go to Menu > FILE > SAVE AS > Text CSV (.csv) > KEEP CURRENT FORMAT
• This will open a small pop-up window asking for details. Verify that the file is being saved as the following:
  • Character set: Unicode (UTF-8)
  • Field delimeter: , (comma)
  • Text delimeter: ” (quotation mark)

Once your metadata CSV is ready, you can upload it via the APPLY CSV page.

For more information on anything covered in this post, contact Customer Support at support@pond5.com.

Pond5 uses image-recognition software that can generate keywords automatically to your uploaded media.

We are extremely proud to be the first marketplace to apply innovative Artificial Neural Networks and make auto-tagging available to you. Like the human brain, the more you use the auto-tagging tool the more efficient and effective it becomes.

Using Auto-Tagging

• Navigate to your Uploads page, where you can add metadata to your uploaded files
• Click on the Edit or Needs Edits button, which will direct you to the Edit Item page

• Scroll to Keywords to find our suggested tags

• Review Keywords
• To expand, manually remove or add tags
• Confirm and click Save Changes and Submit for Review

Using Only Your Created Keywords

If you prefer, you do have the option to continue to rely exclusively on the keywords that you create.

• Apply a CSV file containing only the keywords you have created
• Edit items straight from your Uploads page before you visit the Edit Item page.
• Disable the Automatically Suggested Keywords on the My Preferences page.