Outsourcing your uploading and keywording

When you're an iStockphoto contributor, and want to concentrate on your core business: photography, illustration, video or audio, you may want to let someone else do all the peripheral work for you: uploading, keywording, resubmission. You may have a friend wanting to help you out, or maybe even a professional keywording service.

The only real option available up to now was to give your iStockphoto credentials to the "keyworder", so that he can log into the iStockphoto site and do the uploads and keywording for you. This is bad practice, and in fact is forbidden by iStockphoto. The reasons for this are obvious:

• You can never really trust that other party. Your iStockphoto credentials are sacred: they grant access to ALL of your iStockphoto assets and allow your earnings to be withdrawn from iStockphoto! They even allow your iStockphoto password to be changed, so that you can get locked out of your own account!
• Even when you fully trust the keyworder, accidents can happen! Think of it: you'll probably email them the credentials, and that email will be on the clients system for a long time. If he responds to you, your credentials will usually still be in that mail as well, what if he inadvertently CC's some other person? You get the drift ... this is no good.

The DeepMeta solution

The diagram below shows how you can solve this problem using DeepMeta. The contributor lets DeepMeta generate an encrypted version of his iStockphoto password. Next, he sends it to the keyworder. The keyworder can then use the contributor username and the encrypted password as credentials in DeepMeta, and from that moment, he can work with the portfolio of the contributor, upload, keyword, etc.

The encrypted password allows the keyworder to use DeepMeta on behalf of the contributor, but that's all: he cannot use it to login to the iStockphoto site, as the site will not recognize the encrypted password. The contributor himself can still use DeepMeta (with his original password), and fetch his portfolio data from time to time for verification, statistics and for backup.

Detailed procedure

• Start DeepMeta. Make sure you have already entered your iStockphoto credentials in the Options | Main options window.
• In the main menu: select Help | About..., or press the F1 key. The "About DeepMeta" window will pop up,
• At the bottom of the "About" window: click the "View encrypted credentials" button.
• A text box will show up with the encrypted password.
• Select the entire password string and copy and paste it to a new email message (or similar). Send this info, along with your iStockphoto username to the keyworder.

• Once you've received the username and encrypted keyword from the contributor, you are ready to start managing the portfolio on his behalf.
• Start a fresh empty copy of DeepMeta. The best way is to create a new user account in Windows, and login to that account. DeepMeta maintains a local database per Windows user account. This allows you to manage separate DeepMeta instances in case you have multiple iStockphoto portfolios to manage.
• In the main menu: select Options | Main options. Enter the username and the encrypted password you received from the contributor. The encrypted password can get quite long, so it can fill the entire password box with black dots. That's OK.
• Click the "Test" button to verify. Note that it may take a few tries with the Test button before you get an OK confirmation (wait some 10 seconds between each try). DeepMeta contacts the iStock server for validating the credentials, and this doesn't always appear to work first time. If the validation still returns an error: click the OK button to save the credentials. Close DeepMeta, wait a while and then restart and test again.
That's all there is to it. A lot of text, but basically it all comes down to fetching an encrypted password in DeepMeta, sending it over to the keyworder and let him use if like a regular password in DeepMeta. It's as simple as that.

Revoking the password

If the contributor wants to stop his relation with the keyworder, he can simply change his password at the iStockphoto site. The encrypted password generated by DeepMeta will automatically become invalid as well.