Getty Images is a well-known platform that offers both stock photos as well as editorial images of current events and celebrities. To sell here, you must be 18 or older with a confirmed Fotolia account. For images downloaded from a subscription plan, the minimum guaranteed payment depends on the photographer’s rank. Photographers earn 33% of each sale through both Fotolia and Adobe Stock. Users of popular programs like Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator can buy images directly from their design program, which will theoretically place your image in front of more people than just the website alone. They’ll reject images for 26 different reasons, including bad exposure, camera artefacts, sharpness, and over-editing.įotolia is now part of Adobe Stock, which sells images directly to Creative Cloud users. Images must be shot on a DSLR or mirrorless with at least six megapixels (though likely not a problem in today’s camera market). While Alamy doesn’t edit or alter the images you submit, they do have strict guidelines. To join, photographers need to fill out a form and pass a quality control test. Photographers earn 50% of every sale, and aren’t restricted to selling exclusively with Alamy. With over 60 million images, Alamy is the largest stock photo website, but they also pay well too. Top 10 places to sell stock photography 1. Interested in making your images available for purchase? Here are 10 excellent places to sell stock photography. Many agencies pay photographers a percentage of the profit from their images, though each option may vary a bit. Others are a bit more selective but offer a better royalty rate. Some stock photography websites allow anyone to join. However, it still offers some value as a bit of extra income on your photography, or a way for freelance photographers to avoid the proverbial “all your eggs in one basket.” While surviving on stock photography alone is tough to do, there are still a few perks of selling photos with a stock photo agency. I just submit everything I can now and consider any resulting income as gravy.Stock photography may be a crowded market. The big changeover came with micro stocks, of course. If you have adapted to the times, you can make decent money from stock. I get tons of images selling for less than a dime these days with a few decent sales mixed in. Like everything else, stock image sales are different now. Whether stock images are in a death spiral is debatable. I have, at times, had the same image sell for the highest and the lowest amount on the same quarterly invoice. They even sell through Alamy occasionally. I primarily use another agency now and they are very proactive for me but only a few hundred images there as well. Maybe they did bad things but, since I don't depend on them for a living, I can't say. They have always treated me well as far as I can tell.
My best-selling images with them are related to dogs and not much else. I have only a few hundred images with Alamy so no expertise. Your experience will be a mirror of the quantity and quality of your images. Besides it gives you a lot more exposure in the digital world.
As with stock, you can sell that transparency or photo in many ways and for many different uses, and it could potentially earn you money til the day you kick the bucket.
Where years ago a transparency might have earned me 400 dollars, today a similar digital image might garner 40 cents from a micro.ĭear Richard, I have to agree with you about a transparency being able to give you $400 back in the day, but that was it, you sold it and you could never use it again. But what will the client be willing to pay? The micro photographers are suffering from dilution.Įxample: My port on SS = 6522 images. Well, no doubt there will be a demand, even an increased demand, for stock photos in the future. Things have really changed since then, but the death spiral of stock photography is still with us. (Although I already had a few hundred images in agencies.) I fondly remember the first time somebody described the stock photo industry as being in a "death spiral." I'm pretty sure it was in 1971 or 1972. Nothing is more consistent in the world of stock photography than predictions of doom and gloom and your words flooded me with nostalgia. SS like all micros is in a death spiral but I'll welcome the (diminishing) money as long as it lasts.