Micropayment Stock Photography Tips

So, you wonder if you can make any money selling your images online.  I wondered the same thing, about two years ago.  As a full time graphic designer, I have purchased tons of stock photos for use in my designs. Professional stock photo collections can cost anywhere from $200-$500 per disc, with single shots costing anywhere from $80-$200 themselves. It’s thrilling to find places online where you can purchase high-res, professional quality images at a fraction of that price.  Then I thought, "hey, why can't I sell my own photos?".   Recently there has been a boom in the micropayment stock photography business. The concept for photographers is this: instead of selling one image at $80-$120 once, why not sell it for fifty cents 200 times? In the long-run, the profit margin can even be much larger than simply selling it at a larger, fixed price.

  How much can you really make?

As much as you want...it depends how much you really want to make, as well as how much time you have.  Can you really make any money off of selling images for fifty cents each? Well, if you make just ten dollars a day (ie: by selling 20 images on one site or multiple sites at .50 per photo sale) you will be raking in an extra $300 a month. That should cover a few of those bills, maybe even all of your car payment! This is not an impossible feat, either. Back when my image collection on many of the sites was only around 100 photos, and I was surpassing these profits. If you sell 20 bucks worth of images a day on average, there’s an easy $600/month! The best part about it is, once you do the initial work of editing your images, keywording them, and uploading – you’re done.  At that point you can sit on your butt and let your images work FOR you.  There are all times that we get too busy...I have gone several months without being able uploading anything new.  What happened?  The sales kept on rolling in.  All of the past work I had done continues to pay off.  I know many that are even able to do this full time and the income they make from it pays all of their bills (they don't all live in third world countries, either. )  There are even a lot of people that are making 4, 5, even 6 figures from stock photography monthly.  That's right, I said monthly.  The sky is the limit.

"But wait..." I thought to myself, "I have a decent 4+ megapixel digital camera. Why can’t I sell some of my nice shots? I bet people would buy them."  Sure enough, people did. Whether it was a picture of my feet at the beach, a shot of a tricked-out sports car or even a background I created using filters in Adobe Photoshop; people bought them. I’m not a professional photographer and you don’t have to be either, in order to do this. It helps to have some novice or amateur experience with a camera, and if you know your Photoshop you are going to be even more advantaged. If you are a professional photographer, don't shy away from this.  I know you're very busy, but take a half hour here and there, and upload some images.  Do it when you get slow, and then you will still be making extra money while you're busy!  Graphic designers - both seasoned pros and students in training: you have an advantage.  Being a designer helps you know what types of images and artwork us wacky design gurus are looking for, and find most useful.  If you have both graphic design and photography experience, that gives you an even bigger advantage. I have been profiting from this industry for going on three years, and I’d like to share with you my experience.

How does it work?

First, you obviously need to sign up for an account at one of the sites listed below. After that, you should make sure the images you are planning on uploading are of good enough quality to get accepted by the approvers on the site. After a while, you will get the hang of knowing what they will approve, and what they won’t. Your pics should have been shot from at least a 2 megapixel camera, although some sites require 3 or higher, and should be corrected for proper color. If there is a little bit of noise in the image, try out a nice little photoshop add-on called NeatImage. It works great in cleaning up the graininess you might have in certain areas. Once you make sure everything is in tip-top shape with your image, you next need to upload it to the microstock website. Once it’s up there, you need to add keywords, so that designers can find your image through a normal search. You also have to give it a name, brief description, and a title. Each micropayment site has different image categories. After choosing the best categories for your image, your image is ready to be pushed into the site’s “approval cue”. Once accepted or denied, you receive a confirmation email. That’s it. Now you sit back, relax, and wait for the sales to fly in!

Now…what if you had your same small collection of images spread across many different stock photo websites? I thought this to myself, and decided to try it for ha-ha’s. Sure enough, my sales multiplied. Start off with one site at first. Once you get the hang of it, you can upload your titled / keyworded images to the other sites easily, then simply categorize and submit.

TIP: The trick is to keyword your images with an IPTC / EXIF editor either in Adobe Photoshop, or just download the free program called IrfanView www.irfanview.com Doing this saves you a lot of time, since you won't have to keep typing in lists of words with every website you submit to.  It's also way easier than copying and pasting things repeatedly. Also remember that when keywording, try using as many relevant words as you can. That will get you the most views/sales on your image.

How do you get paid?

They can either send you a paypal transfer, or even a check. I prefer paypal, because it's quick and easy.  Many sites also offer Moneybookers, which is similar to paypal.  Upon receiving electronic payments, simply transfer the funds from there over to your bank/checking account, and you are ready to spend that hard earned cash on groceries, the rent, even high-priced gasoline for your car.  Once you hit the site’s minimum payout limit (usually from $30-$100), then you can get a payment sent.

Which stock photo sites make you the most money?
Trying to see which site sells more images than the next is tricky.  There are a lot of elements involved, and it seems like sales figures fluctuate from month to month amongst the micro sites.  Factors like portfolio size, photo types, site search engines, and even categorization all play a part.  All I can do is give you my best sites - the ones that I personally think are worth my time to upload to.  Here are the links to my top-selling sites - sign up, and try them out. Then you can make your own conclusions.

Shutterstock: My number one top seller. Shutterstock offers subscriptions to its users, so people on there are looking to grab their maximum limit of 25 images a day. If you have nice looking images, you’ll most definitely get tons of downloads. They have a very convenient ftp upload process as well, which saves a lot of time.  Shutterstock pays $.25-.30 per image, but that adds up so much faster than any of the other micropayment sites. (If you have earned $500 or more in sales from Shutterstock, we will increase your payment per Standard License download to 30¢ per download. This is a raise of 5¢ (20%) per download and will go into effect May 1st, 2007.)  So if you've sold over $500 in images, you get a 5 cent raise.  This doesn't seem like much, but it makes a big difference.   Once you pass $75 in sales before the end of each month, you can qualify for a check or paypal payout. If you don't surpass that, it rolls over to the next month.  I personally make the most on this site.  Be careful, though - since they are a bit pickier when it comes to accepting images, be sure that your original 10 photos that you submit with your photographer's applicaton are top-notch.  You might want to sign up for SS after you've uploaded at least 20-30 good pics to fotolia, featurepics, and bigstockphoto (read about those sites below). If Shutterstock rejects your "BEST 10" photo application, you'll have to wait another month before you can re-apply.  Be careful, because that would be rough.  My suggestion is not to sign up them as your first micro site.  Sign up on the others, and then take the best 10 of your portfolios to upload for your Shutterstock application.

iStockPhoto: This has been my next top seller consistently, with a minute fraction of the amount of images I have approved on the other sites.  These guys have been the leaders at the micropayment game for years now.  What I have found personally, is that the images that do get accepted-they sell like hotcakes!  I have an extremely small portfolio, and yet that is enough to beat my Shutterstock sales some months.  They are pretty tough on photos – at least mine.  It took me a few tries to get my application accepted, personally.  Bring your “A” game when you sign up.  The majority of my images are custom-photoshopped textures and backgrounds.  They seem to like real photos better.  I'm going to try to upload more of my stuff, as soon as I can find the time.  Don't let the smaller image payout amounts fool you; they really do add up fast like with Shutterstock.  As much as I really think the upload process for iStock is more cumbersome, and a lot more work than uploading to the other micros - I still recommended doing it.  It's definitely worth the extra effort.  Getty Images () now owns iStockphoto, and we all know that Getty is one of the biggest names in stock photography. 

BigStockPhoto: I've sold tons of images on this site. It's a great site if you’re a first timer, since they are very lenient.  My personal approval rating (precentage of images accepted out of your total uploads) is the best on BigStock. This site is in my top 5 for sales. They have ftp upload as well.  You make $.50 or $1.00 per image on this site.  There are many other Extended licensing options that will make you even more than that.

Dreamstime: This site site ranks among my top 5 for sales.  I get plenty of regular sales from DT. They now have ftp upload support - and ftp upload makes life a heck of a lot easier / much faster.  $.50 and up per image on this site, depending on the size of the photo purchased.

StockXpert: This site has been the latest breakout hit.  The good thing about StockXpert is that you can make sales ranging from .50-5.00 depending on the size of the photo that the user purchase.  I'd put this site in my top 5 for sure.  Whenever someone searches the free site StockXchange (www.sxc.hu) many times StockXpert search results show up near the bottom of the screen.  What a great way to market them.  Sign up for this one for sure.  They don't even require you to categorize the photos, unless you want to.  They feature FTP bulk upload.

Fotolia: These guys have ftp upload as well.  Excellent income on this site.  Fotolia is in my top 5 best sellers.  Sales have been ever-increasing as fotolia continues with their own marketing.  On fotolia a low-res photo sale pays you $.33 up to larger sizes, which will get you over $1.00.   Once you achieve higher downloads, your status goes up -and your pay does also.  The next level up gives you $.37 per credit sale. 

123 Royalty Free: Here the minimum payout is $50.  The sales come in fairly slow like BigStock, but very regular.  123RF is definitely worth uploading your portfolio to.  All you have to do, is upload your images that have the IPTC data/keywords embedded, and then wait for your review.  That's it.  No categorizing, no more work.  You will generally make .22-.44 cents for each photo sold.  123RF is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Inmagine Corp LLC.

LuckyOliver: This site was awesome, but recently closed its doors.  I will miss it.  I was a photo reviewer here, and am currently looking for another site to review on, part time.

CanStockPhoto: This place has done pretty well for me also. They have a nice java applet that allows you to upload an entire folder full of images, or you can use their ftp feature.  Another cool feature that CanStock sports is the "auto categories" option.  The payouts on this site vary on whether a subscription member, or guest purchases the photo - and also on the size they buy.  It ranges from $.20 to over $1.00  Minimum payout is $50. 

Featurepics: Here you set your own photo price - and when your pics sell you get 70% of that price!  If you set your image at 20 bucks, you will make $14 when it sells! Not bad...beats .25-.50 cents.  FTP uploading now makes it easier than ever.  There is no need to categorize your images when you submit them here.  You can do it if you want, but at this time that step is optional - and that alone is a huge time-saver.  I do sell images regularly here, and I get more per image the way I price them.  The site does make sales a bit slower than the other micros; that's the only downside.  I usually set my images at around $10 and then set the option for resizing.  This way if a buyer wants to purchase a photo at a smaller size than full resolution, they can purchase it at a fraction of the set $10 price.

Crestock: I really didn't have much faith in Crestock at first.  I left a small batch of 50 or so images up on there, and surprisingly over a year or so they started increasing in sales every now and then.  So, I figured that I would upload the rest of my stuff.  Their upload process is simple and easy, and the sales have been picking up steadily as time goes on.  Definitely worth uploading to if you're patient.  I've only hit one payout so far with them, but I hope to hit many more now that the minimum payout limit has been lowered to just $50.

PantherMedia: This is a German stock photo site that recently has been translated in English as well.  Nice!  I hear that the sales are similar to Dreamstime, so I am going to try them out.  I just began to upload my photos to these guys a few months ago, and already have had about 3 sales.  The earning here are a lot higher, as they are more of a midstock agency.  You get paid in Euros, which convert nicely into USD, seeing that the Euro is worth a lot more than the dollar.

MostPhotos: This is a new site where there are NO REVIEWS!!  I am loving this - it's a really fun community where you can comment on other images, rate them, chat with fellow photographers, and much more.  Try this one out.  I have had 3 sales for $18 USD each since joining in March 2008.  You get paid in Euros, which convert nicely into USD, seeing that the Euro is worth a lot more than the dollar.

SnapVillage: This stock photo agency sounds promising, as it's owned by Corbis.  There is no FTP upload, which stinks - but I'm sure that will change soon.  You can upload 5 at a time, which is a little slow.  The site reads the META/IPTC embedded data which is pretty standard.  They just began advertising in GDusa magazine (a national trade publication for graphic designers) so I hope that this site will be a big hit.  This agency is owned by Corbis ( ) so I am hoping for the best.  So far I've made a few sales, but I only have about 200 images approved so far.

Alamy: Not exactly a microstock site, but I'll explain more about this one as soon as I gain more experience with it.  Currently I have a very small portfolio.  You have the option to set your images as RF, RM, or RP.  I am opting to stick to the RF model, so that I can still sell my same images elsewhere on other agencies.  You have to upsize your images for Alamy, which is just an extra step before uploading them.  You won't get sales right away with this site, but once they come - they come in large amounts.  A fried of mine with a portfolio of around 500 photos sold a small size image after it was sitting on Alamy for about six months.  He made about $150 just off one sale.  Not bad, right?  Since then he sold two more.  This agency isn't micropayment, it's more "macro stock". 

YAYmicro:  This is a new site which is launching very soon.  They are now accepting images, and have a very easy FTP upload system.  I am enjoying it a lot.  Try it out!

Fotomind:  I am hearing of sales at this site, so I signed up recently.  I am still in the process of uploading my portfolio, but I am loving the easy FTP upload process.  A+ so far. 

TIP:  FTP uploading makes life so much easier, since most images are over 1 megabyte, and if you’re on a broadband connection you can upload all of your keyworded images at once. Once they’re uploaded, you complete them by categorizing them and submitting. You can use a free program on your pc called CuteFTP or if you’re on a mac with OSX you can download Fetch.

I am not a member of all of the micropayment sites, but a good place to find more help and to find more sites is www.talkmicro.com It’s a nice place to have an “unbiased” discussion about all the micro stes.  Another great forum like this is www.microstockgroup.com

This can become very addicting, once your sales start coming in. It might be a little slow for you at first, but that will soon change. Obviously you will get more sales with both higher quality and a higher quantity of images. I spent about two to three hours a week in my spare time, to get to where I am now. It definitely pays off. If you’re a graphic designer and want to stick only to “designing” check out those links above anyway. They all offer really great stock photos at ridiculously cheap prices. What I like about this little side venture I have going, is that I get to keep and use all of the great stock photos that I create! You can never have too many images in your collection. I lay out magazines and editorials for a living, and have even used many of my own personal images in my work.

...most importantly, have fun!  You'll enjoy it even more once the money starts rolling in, I know I do!  If you have any questions, feel free to contact me

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