Luis Alvarez, who shoots for iStock & Getty, has a great post on his blog about how he uses LookStat collections to track his shoot ROI.

It was only just recently, about 3 weeks ago, that I had a deeper look into LookStat.com, and was surprised to finally discover a tool to help me improve measuring return on investment (ROI). In LookStat you can set up a collection of pictures (suitably the results of one photo session) and LookStat will tell you how much money those pictures have generated. You have different viewing options and charts, making it easy to understand.

Luis’s approach is to invest in research and quality. This in turn means that he’s careful about tracking his return. His top returning series is shown below:

We created the collections feature to allow photographers to do just this. Stay tuned for more on this coming soon!

Luis also has another post about his Getty & iStock earnings trends. This too is well worth a read and his final chart on iStock vs. Getty RPI is fascinating. It lines up well with our thoughts about the rapidly fading distinction between microstock & traditional stock photography.

You can check out Luis’ work at iStock and you he’s @velaphoto on twitter.