how do i sell stock photos

Summary of How to Sell Photos on iStock

• Choose your best photos with the highest selling potential
• Ensure you own the copyright of the images
• Go to the iStock website and then apply to become a contributor
• Wait for the review process and then you can start contributing to the site if your application is accepted

Full Answer

How to make money with stock photography?

Oct 05, 2021 · The best way to sell photos online is by listing them as stock images for sale on your own website. Ecommerce platforms like Shopify let you sell photographs as digital …

What stock photos sell best?

Jan 19, 2021 · Best Places to Sell Your Photos Online. 1. Adobe Stock. Sell your photos online with Adobe Stock. Adobe Stock has the credibility of being the maker of the most popular …

Where can I buy cheap stock photos?

Sep 14, 2020 · When you sell photos on Can Stock Photo, it also lists your photos for sale on Fotosearch, a stock photography agency. 10. Adobe Stock. Adobe Stock is one of the best …

How to create stock photography that sells?

9 Tips for Selling your Photos Online. 1. Sell What’s Hot. If you’re looking to sell your photos online, one of the questions you’ve probably asked yourself is, “What type of photos sell ... 2. …

How much money can you make selling stock photos?

What is the best place to sell stock photos?

Is it legal to sell stock photos?

Where can I sell my stock photography?

Is it worth selling photos on Shutterstock?

How much should I sell stock photos for?

Can I sell a photo I didn't take?

Can I sell a photo I took?

How can I take stock photos without being sued?

What type of photos sell best?

How much can you make selling stock photos?

According to ziprecruiter stock photographers can earn an income of around $36,991 per year, on average.

Is selling stock photos profitable?

Stock photographers make money through commissions each time someone downloads their image from a stock photo site. This means that profits in stoc...

How do I sell stock photos?

You can sign up as a photographer on a stock photography website and upload your photos to it. You will get commissions based on how many times you...

What is the best stock photo selling site?

Getty Images and Shutterstock are the two most popular stock photo websites and they command the lion’s share of the market when it comes to stock...

Is stock photography a good investment?

Overall, stock photography is a great investment for any serious amateur looking to earn some extra money. The important thing here is that it will take a lot of patience, dedication, and consistency to revel in the fruits that microstock agencies offer.

How to make your photos more marketable?

To make your photos more marketable, you need to offer something that end-users are looking for. Businesses, bloggers, and marketing agencies are the end users that determine what sells and what doesn’t.

Is Fotolia owned by Adobe?

Fotolia has been with us for a while now but it was acquired by Adobe and many stock photographers found their sales taking an upward trend. This site has pay rates similar to Shutterstock’s, although slightly higher. One thing worth noting about Adobe Stock is that you can effortlessly upload your photos via Lightroom, which is an added advantage for those who perform careful keywording and metadata using this tool. Furthermore, Adobe software users can purchase images directly through any Adobe platform. Another feature that further endears them to photographers is the ease of submitting images.

What are keywords in photography?

Keywords are the basic way in which prospective clients find photographs to buy. As such, the appropriate keywords are pretty crucial if you expect a buyer to bump into your images.

Best places to sell photos online

There are quite a few websites where you can license or sell photos and images. Some of the best ones include:

How to sell photos online: 3 key steps

Stock photo sites offer the simplest way to sell your photos. However, they take such a large cut of each sale that it may be worth creating your own photography site. Let’s look at how to sell your photos online through a direct and legitimate channel.

Legal aspects of selling photos online

Understanding the legal part of selling photography online can be the toughest part of building your business. For beginners, separating things like “retail use” from “commercial use” when giving people rights to your photos can be daunting. To protect yourself from any legal mishaps, make sure you’re familiar with these terms:

How to sell photography prints

One of the easiest ways to make money as a photographer online is by selling prints directly to fans of your work. You can sell prints in various shapes and sizes to suit your customers and even add your images to various products like pillows and clothing.

How to sell your photography as a service

If you prefer to make money with custom photography requests and event coverage, you can sell your services instead. Selling photography as a service usually involves requesting a per-hour price for specific tasks, like shooting wedding photography or product images.

Start your journey from capturing to selling now

By now, you probably see the earning potential in selling photos online. Whether photography is your full-time hustle, your side gig, or your hobby, there are more ways than ever before to turn your passion into profit.

How to sell photos online FAQ

The best way to sell photos online is by listing them as stock images for sale on your own website. Ecommerce platforms like Shopify let you sell photographs as digital downloads and avoid the commissions charged by third-party websites. You can also create offers by putting images together in a collection or bundle based on a theme.

What is Adobe stock?

Adobe Stock has the credibility of being the makers of the most popular photo editing software on the market. Plus, any photos you upload to the marketplace are easily accessible in other Adobe products.

How many customers does Getty Images have?

Getty Images is one of the most popular names in the stock photo industry. With over 1.5 million customers in over 200 countries, large audiences around the world will see your photos.

Is Foap a profitable app?

Foap has been featured in ABC News as being a profitable app for photo selling. Users make 50% of the profits from it even when big brands, such as Sony and MasterCard buy their photos.

Can you license stock photos multiple times?

The brighter side is that since stock images can be licensed multiple times to multiple buyers, so there is indeed great potential for photographers to sell stock photos and earn residual income over time.

Does a photographer keep copyrights?

But the photographer keeps the copyrights to themselves. Keeping the copyright allows photographers to reuse the stock images and make multiple sales of the same image, generating recurring income over time. While there might be some exceptions, this is how it usually works.

Can you submit images to Dreamstime?

Dreamstime. You can choose to submit images to Dreamstime either as a non-exclusive contributor or as an exclusive contributor. You can also mix-and-match the two depending on images that you have submitted. For non-exclusive images, Dreamstime pays 25-50% of the net sales of an image's downloads.

Is selling photos online a good idea?

As you can see, selling photos is a great online business idea. Whether photography is your hobby, your side gig, or your full-time hustle, there are more avenues than ever before when it comes to selling photos online—it just takes a little extra know-how.

How much does Zenfolio charge for photography?

Plus, it offers photography print and digital product options, with a commission fee of 7%.

What is Zenfolio photography?

You can build a website to showcase your work, attract new customers, and sell your photos online. Plus, it offers photography print and digital product options, with a commission fee of 7%.

Is 500px royalty free?

All content submitted to the site is royalty free, meaning it’s licensed for unlimited, perpetual use, and pricing is based on file size.

What is Shutterstock?

Shutterstock is a leading stock photography website for selling photos online. The platform has paid out over a billion dollars to its community in the past 15 years, and it can get your photos seen by millions of customers.

What is istock photo?

iStock Photo is the micro-stock offshoot of by Getty Images. The major difference between the two is your photos on iStock are non-exclusive, which means you can sell your photography with other agencies as well. However, this means you earn a much lower commission than exclusive photos. Commission ranges from 15% to 45%, depending on whether the photos are exclusive or non-exclusive.

What is Getty Images?

Getty Images is on the higher end of stock photography sites. It attracts brands and publishers looking for high-quality or hard-to-find exclusive images to license. The platform, along with its microstock site, iStock, reaches over 1.5 million customers around the world.

What is the best website to sell photos?

Pixiset is among the best websites to sell photos online, offering a range of free and paid solutions. You build online galleries for public display and private client use – client galleries are password protected. Pixiset is user-friendly and allows customers to select favourite images or download a whole gallery.

Is selling photos online scary?

Final Words. As you can see, selling photos online is not as scary as it sounds. There’s a huge range of online sites purpose-built to host and sell your photos. These range from stock photography sites, hosting galleries, a portfolio page and even a humble blog site with plugins.

What is a keyword in a photo?

Keywords are a lot like tags applied to a social media post. You attach keywords to images to show up at the top of the list in a search outcome. Getting your keywords right in the first place will mean that when customers search for a particular style of photo, yours appear at the top.

What is Zenfolio for?

Zenfolio. start free trial. Zenfolio is another hugely popular choice for those looking to build a creative website to sell photos online. Zenfolio provides photographers with a one-stop-shop to upload, display, promote and sell photos online.

Is Stocksy the smallest stock photography website?

Stocksy isn’t the largest stock photography website, but it certainly isn’t the smallest. It has a reputation for being the artsiest stock agency online. That’s why it’s undoubtedly the site that publishers love to look at when searching for new images.

What is Etsy for photography?

Etsy is the biggest marketplace on the internet for handmade products. For photography, the items you can sell can be physical prints or digital downloads. Most of the products are unique, and a lot are one-off items that the creators won’t make again.

How many images does Shutterstock have?

Shutterstock houses 184 million images and 91 million videos. They have been enjoying steady growth in sales since its founding in 2003. In 2017, people downloaded 172,000,000 images from their website.

Is Bigstock like Shutterstock?

For the most part, BigStock has all the features you can expect from microstock sites. On the surface, it’s just like Shutterstock, Dreamstime, or iStock. But what makes it a bit different is its credit system. And that’s why selling photos online using this platform is also unique.

What is Adobe stock?

Fotolia (now Adobe Stock) is another microstock photography website . It represents over 57 million images. Adobe repurchased this site in 2014, integrating it into its creative cloud service. Here, you can receive royalties of between 20 and 46%.

When was the company iPhoto founded?

This company is perhaps the most prestigious on the list. Since it was founded in 1995, it has become one of the premier stock and editorial photography websites in the world.

Is Smugmug a good website?

Smugmug is an excellent site for those photographers with an entrepreneurial mindset. They let you choose how much to charge for your photos, and they let you keep 85% in commissions.

Pssst!

Want to dive even deeper? If you’ve read my monthly income reports then you already know that I haven’t added a single clip or photo to my portfolio since January this year, and yet I’m still making hundreds of dollars each and every month from photo and video sales. It’s the easiest money I’ve ever made.

Total Income from Photo Sales (in 2019 so far)

I’ll get right to it. Here’s what I have made so far this year from stock photography sales alone.

Stock Photo Sales in 2019

In case it’s hard to see, here are the total numbers for the year so far from each site:

Strategies to sell more stock photos

The short answer is both! Obviously, the more photos you have available for download, the better your odds are for success. Especially when you consider how many millions of stock photos are already out there. And there are some pretty good ones, I might add.

Best Selling Stock Photos

I thought it could be interesting to share a few of my best selling photos and how much they’ve each earned over the long haul.

Stock photography : Is it worth it?

Now that we’ve taken a thorough look at exactly how much money I make selling stock photos, let’s talk about whether or not it’s worth the time and energy.

Conclusions

If you don’t have the capacity to take stock video clips or if you have an abundance of great photos to upload, I don’t want to discourage you in any way. It’s all about what makes the most sense for you! If you can upload 1000+ photos and are happy with an extra $100 bucks from it each month then I say go for it.