Hi there

This is our first newsletter in 2017 and we hope you all entered the new year motivated to push more great content to your customers! As most of you know iStock's Unification Project is reaching the final milestone with the official launch of the ESP platform today - february 1st 2017. This newsletter is going to focus on the new version of qHero. Enjoy the read!

Step 1: Uploading to qHero

Collections are now called Batches defined by what type of file you are uploading, and yes video is finally supported! Upon uploading files you are prompted to choose type of content, which will make all editing features specifically designed for the content type.

Step 2: Keywording

Our new enhanced AI generates keywords for your images during uploading based on image recognition - you don't have to do anything but maybe add a few specifics and remove a few generics - that is it!

As a completely new thing iStock has made it mandatory to add "Country". We have fought and will continue fighting to turn this into an optional choice. We don't believe specifying country makes sense because most content is generic by nature, and specifying country seems to defeat the purpose. On top of this "Country" will count as one of maximum 50 slots - more about slots later.

Step 3: Model Releases

In the model release step iStock have added the option of specifiying:

Composition
Facial expressions
Number of people

These choices can be great, but be aware that choosing one or more of these will also be at the expense of your total of 50 terms.

A new requirement from iStock is that all Model Releases must have visual reference to ensure verification during inspection.

Step 4: Choosing terms

This is the disambiguation step, and with improved auto-disambiguation from qHero and the following simple system, you should be through this step quickly:

A red star means you haven't disambiguated a minimum of 5 keywords, and therefore you cannot submit the content yet.

A green star means you have disambiguated a minimum of 5 keywords, but there are still keywords that hasn't been disambiguated. You can submit with this status, but we recommend that you disambiguate all keywords.

A green checkmark means all keywords has been disambiguated.

Slots

iStock used to allow for a total of 50 keywords, but this has been changed to a total of 50 slots including "Terms" (disambiguated keywords), Keywords, a (mandatory) choice of "Country", and any (optional) choice in the Model Release step regarding "Composition", "Expression", and "Number of people".

qHero sums up your total taken slots, and all you need to worry about is not to exceed 50 slots.

Step 5: Submitting to iStock

As a response to feedback we have added the option to schedule submissions. This way you can finish multiple batches and i.e. schedule that a batch is uploaded every Monday the forthcoming month, and leave it to qHero to get it done.

With the launch of the new ESP Platform you need your ESP Credentials to submit. All exclusive photographers are receiving ESP credentials now, and non-exclusives wills start receiving ESP credentials during february 2nd or 3rd.

Other news from qHero

Multiple Select: Shift-selecting has been implemented as a response to feedback making bulk selections much faster.
Brief Code: A dedicated area for brief codes has been added to the uploading step.

Besides from the above changes qHero is the same as usual, only smarter! And oh - did you notice our new landing page?

Other news from iStock

Categories have finally been terminated. This has been on our wish list for years, what a waste of time categories have been. Luckily for you guys they where automated in the previous version of qHero, so maybe you won't notice :)
Down the line we expect iStock to enable data extraction such as sales to enable statistics in qHero, but for now that is not possible to extract.

That is it!

Thank you so much for your endless dedication and great feedback. Don't hesitate reaching out if you have questions during this transition and as always - we need all the feedback we can get!

Continue uploading

Make sure to follow us on twitter and facebook, although there isn't much content there yet, we are using it for critical updates such as recently when iStocks systems where down not accepting uploads.