Fifteen agencies instead of six: where MetaBrain now sends your files, and why not everywhere

The main thing first, as always: getting metadata out of MetaBrain takes no setup at all. Open it, drop the files in, wait. Getting those files onto the stock sites afterwards does take one bit of setup, though: a login and a password for each agency. That is what this post is about.

Until now the desktop app could send finished files to six agencies: Shutterstock, Adobe Stock, Pond5, Dreamstime, Depositphotos and 123RF. We said it ourselves: six is not thirty-three, and there was nothing to dress up. Now it is fifteen. Plus one more row where you can type in any server at all.

What is new

Four agencies with a fixed address. Switch them on and enter your login:

• Alamy - photos and vectors. Photos go to the Stock folder, and an EPS goes to the Vectors folder together with the same-name JPEG that carries its metadata. That is exactly what Alamy's own help asks for, and nobody has to sort it by hand any more. Alamy does not take video from individual contributors right now, so video is not sent there.
• Envato Market - VideoHive and AudioJungle, so video and music. The password is not your site password but your API key. One more thing worth knowing: files wait on their server for 24 hours, and within that time each one has to be finished in the Envato upload form.
• BlackBox - video only, .mov and .mp4. It is not a stock site but a middleman: it curates clips and sells them through Shutterstock, Pond5, Adobe Stock, iStock and others.
• Lori - photos and video.

Five agencies where the server address is issued in your contributor panel: Freepik, Vecteezy, Canva, Storyblocks and MotionElements. Each has a "Server" field in the app. Paste whatever the panel shows, in any form: a plain address, an address with a port, or with sftp:// in front. Next to the field it says where to find that address, for each agency separately.

And your own server. Any FTP, FTPS or SFTP: an agency we do not list, a client's server, your own NAS at home. We do not know any rules for it, so nothing is checked and the files go exactly as they are.

The nine new agencies carry a beta label for now. Addresses, folders and requirements come from each agency's own help pages, but only a real upload from a real account can confirm them. The label comes off each agency separately, as soon as it has confirmed a delivery.

Why not every stock site at once

A fair question: if fifteen is possible, why not forty? The answer is not a pleasant one, but it is honest: many agencies simply have no FTP, and the rest have it arranged in a way that makes "connect them all" impossible.

Some agencies have no FTP at all. Getty Images and iStock take files only through their ESP portal and through an API for approved tools. Pixta stopped taking video over FTP back in 2020. Bigstock has not accepted new files at all since July 2023. Fotolia became Adobe Stock long ago. The old lists of FTP addresses still floating around the internet are full of exactly these: you can connect to them, there is just nowhere to send.

Some have FTP, but not for everyone. Freepik opens FTP only after your first hundred published files. Storyblocks hands out a temporary login and password for video uploads. We cannot know such an address in advance, which is why the "Server" field exists.

Delivering a file is not the same as submitting it. Over FTP the file lands on the agency's server. After that, some agencies read the metadata from the file themselves and queue it for review, while others wait for you to open their site and press a button. At Freepik it is "import files", at Envato a whole form, at Lori you add the titles. We say so plainly in the note for each agency, so that no file gets lost halfway.

And forty agencies at the competitors are not FTP. Their programs log into the stock site with your username and password and fill in the forms for you, the way a person would. Adobe, for example, sends a code by SMS or email for that kind of login. It is a working approach, and for anyone uploading to dozens of places it is irreplaceable. But it has two costs. Your passwords to every stock site are not kept by you. And every redesign of an agency's site can break submissions until the developers fix it. We chose FTP: it is boring, standard, and does not care how the "Upload" button looks this week. Files leave straight from your Mac, and passwords stay in the macOS Keychain.

How it compares

	MetaBrain	StockSubmitter	Microstock+	Xpiks
How many agencies	15 + any server of your own	40	33	any server you type in
How it sends	FTP, FTPS, SFTP from your Mac	logs into the sites with your accounts	from its own servers with your accounts	FTP, FTPS, SFTP
Where it runs	macOS	Windows	in the browser	Windows, macOS, Linux
Writes the metadata itself	yes, that is the product	no, helps you fill it in	no, helps you fill it in	AI on the Pro+ plan
Submission limit	none, upload is part of Hobby and Pro	33 a month free, unlimited for €62.5 a month	33 a month free	depends on the plan

Where the competitors are stronger, let us say it straight. If you need to send to twenty places or more and want the files queued for review right away, StockSubmitter and Microstock+ will do more than we do. If you are on Windows or Linux, our upload is not available to you at all. Xpiks sends to any server and zips vectors for you, while we have a single row for your own server.

Where we are stronger: before the upload. The other tools send whatever you typed into them. MetaBrain first writes the title, the description and the keywords, embeds them in the files, and only then sends them. So the agencies that read metadata from the file itself receive files that are already captioned, not empty ones.

Small things we noticed along the way

Dreamstime takes vectors only in its additional folder and only after their JPG is accepted, and the EPS has to be renamed to the image ID Dreamstime assigns. We used to send the EPS along with the whole batch, and it went nowhere. Now the app sends the JPG, holds the EPS back and says plainly why.

The connection no longer has to be perfect. If the VPN drops or the router dozes off in the middle of a big clip, the app waits, reconnects and continues the file from where it broke off instead of sending it all over again. Meanwhile the agency's row reads "connection lost, retry in N seconds". After every file the app checks the size on the server against the original.

If you upload somewhere that is not on the list, tell us which agency it is. If it has FTP, adding it is one line in the settings.