Photo Marketing
If you know where to sell your images online, you can easily start a new profession as a photographer and earn some additional money. The need for the work of photographers of all skill levels is greater than ever. Everybody, including large companies, small and medium-sized businesses, bloggers, graphic designers, marketers, and publishers, regularly purchases and uses photographs online.
The secret to being able to make money online as a photographer by selling your photographs online is to capitalize on the creativity that is at the heart of your work. It can be challenging to succeed when anybody with the newest iPhone and access to free image editing software can call themselves a photographer.
Sites to buy and sell images online
One of the most common ways to “sell” your images online to businesses, publishers, or anybody else who might be interested in utilizing them for their personal purposes is through licensing.
This is crucial, after all. Consider how a business or media might use your photographs as you go back from that point. Popularity tends to favor versatile images that convey ideas, mainly when they include people.
Alamy
With more than 215 million stock photos, vectors, videos, & 360-degree panoramic pictures, Alamy has the largest varied collection of stock photos in the world. Everything from common photos to specialty products can be sold. Over 110,000 customers and over 60,000 contributors from around the world use the platform. Additionally, it provides the Stockimo app, in which you can sell iPhone pictures and make additional money with your selfies.
Alamy features a simple, user-friendly payment mechanism that pays contributors once each month. 50% of all direct sales are yours if your photographs are exclusively used by Alamy. 40% including all direct sales go to images that are not Alamy exclusives. Alamy does not offer long-term contracts either.
SmugMug Pro
SmugMug can help you sell your images online with a gorgeous portfolio, sales platform, & tools to help you develop whether you’re a beginner or a seasoned pro. Between both the price you decide on and SmugMug’s preset print prices, you get to keep 85% of a profit.
Let’s say you charge $10.79 for a 5×7 print. The markup for that print is $10 if SmugMug’s set price is $0.79. You keep $8.50 in this scenario as profit. The Portfolio plan, however, requires you to sign up for a subscription membership that runs you at least $200 per year, even though you get access to a tonne of eCommerce tools to help you sell photographs online.
Shutterstock
Shutterstock is a top-stock photo website for selling photographs online and is regarded by some as the simplest way to sell photos online. Millions of users can view your images on the network, which has paid out about a billion dollars to its own community in the last 15 years.
Shutterstock is regarded as a micro-stock website where photographs are less expensive and non-exclusive, as well as the main technique to boost downloads is by submitting a sizable number of images that may be utilized as visual metaphors. Although you shouldn’t anticipate making as much money here, it’s a fantastic place to start if you’re new to selling stock images.
Getty Pictures
On the premium end of stock picture websites is Getty Images. It draws companies and publishers eager to license exclusive high-quality or difficult-to-find photos. The portal reaches more than 1.5 million users worldwide in addition to its microstock website, iStock.
As expected, this stock photo website has stricter requirements for contributors looking to sell their photography online. But the fees for submitting high-quality images that have a license from Getty Images start at 20% and then go up to 45%.
iStock Image
The micro-stock division of Getty Images is iStock Photo. The primary distinction between the two is that your images on iStock are non-exclusive, meaning you can also sell your pictures through other companies. You will, however, receive a considerably smaller commission than with exclusive images. Depending on whether the photographs are exclusive or not, the commission varies from 15% to 45%.
Etsy
You might not consider Etsy while looking for sites to sell stock photographs because it is more known as a marketplace for buying and selling one-of-a-kind handmade goods. However, Etsy promises more than 30 million members and a number of opportunities for you to sell your images on its website.
Etsy has a huge advantage over other stock picture websites in that it has a wider readership and a customer base that is eager to buy your photos. Of course, one can sell prints in addition to digital photographs on Etsy. So Etsy is a terrific choice if you want to grow your photography business even more.
Stocksy
For many publishers & creatives, selling photographs online through Stocksy, a well-known mid-range stock photography website, is the finest option. High payouts are available for contributing to Stocksy; photographers can make 50% on standard licenses and 75% on extended licenses. However, all of the photos are 100% exclusive, so you can’t have them on other stock photo websites.
Additionally, Stocksy is an artist-owned cooperative, giving you a stake in the company and the ability to influence its course. When the founder has a surplus, contributors may also earn profit-sharing in the shape of patronage returns. The amount you receive depends on how much you contributed to the cooperative by selling your images and/or footage.
Depositphotos
With customers from more than 200 countries and a collection of more than 150 million images, Depositphotos is indeed a global online platform for visual content. Leading worldwide organizations like Warner Bros., TripAdvisor, Subaru, and much more trust Depositphotos, which has over 100,000 contributors from around the world. Commissions vary between 34% and 42% depending on the resolution and license type, expertise and status of the author on the site, and more.
EyeEm
EyeEm is one of the top online photo marketplaces if you want to work in the professional photography industry because it focuses on advertising stock photography. Additionally, you can be hired for photoshoots by well-known firms like Spotify, Airbnb, and others.
It provides a 50% commission for each photo sold and promotes a community of more than 25 million videographers from more than 150 countries.
Snapped4u
Selling your event images is simple with Snapped4u. Snapped4u was created with event photographers who cover weddings, parties, engagements, and other events in mind. It will simplify your life and give you more money.
You can create a gallery with Snapped4u and add pictures you took from an event to that gallery. The pricing of the pictures is then determined, and that’s all! Following that, Snapped4u sells your photos as jpeg files & emails the buyers right away. On the first of every month, Snapped4u will give you the money you earned via PayPal.
What kinds of pictures do they purchase most frequently?
- People from all over the world, including children, adults, and everyone in between!
- People at work – Businesses love to see these pictures—people writing on laptops, speaking at meetings, etc.
- Simply avoid making them so generic that they turn into a meme.
- Food – Many different varieties of delectable dishes that are left empty.
- Tools like hammers, bolts, nuts, and screws can say a lot to potential customers.
- Cities – Cityscapes, structures, and commuters.
- Nature – This is a no-brainer that is always interesting to photograph or sell.
- Travel – Images from different parts of the world are constantly in demand.
How Can Photographs Be Used To Make Money?
Starting a business doing weddings or photos of people might be enjoyable. But what if you lack confidence in your ability to do that? The solution is right there on your computer screen: sell your images there!
There are several choices available. The most well-known are stock photography companies. There are a few places where you may sell your photographs to customers directly or even as works of art.
Two key steps on how to sell images online
Set your niche.
Specializing in a niche is the simplest approach to selling images online for high prices. Every good photographer has a recurring aesthetic or guiding principle in their work. Consistency is important, regardless of your passion—travel, fashion, cityscapes, environment, food, etc.
To learn more about whatever initially piqued their interest, people are following other people online. In the event that those expectations aren’t realized, they unfollow other users.
Finding your specialty is normally something you find your way towards as you observe which aesthetics and images are popular with your audience if you wish to sell pictures online. However, you can also examine the volume of searches for terms associated with your images using keyword analysis to gauge interest in particular topics.
With the help of the browser extension Keywords Everywhere, you can easily discover & experiment with in-demand subjects as well as angles to see what markets your photos can serve. It displays the search volume directly beneath your Google search.
Add online shopping to your portfolio.
Most photographers have a website where they may display their work for potential customers. However, by adding eCommerce to your website and enabling PayPal or Shop Pay payments, you may open up a number of additional options for how to sell your images online, such as offering services, physical things, and courses. Dave Sanford, for instance, offers prints and calendars for sale in a shop where customers may view his wildlife photography.
Building your portfolio as well as store on Shopify, installing the appropriate apps to customize it to your needs as well as monetization strategies, and then starting to share and sell your photography in various formats, such as social media, ads, and even offline through Shopify POS, are the simplest ways to make money online.
Check out a few of the topics related to art and photography, or start with the one that is free. Additionally, you might want to think about using Shopify apps such as Digital Downloads, an Instagram gallery, and many others to provide more functionality.
Your own e-commerce website may be the greatest option for selling images online for a variety of reasons, several of which we’ll go over below.
Conclusion
Websites with stock photography are ideal because they relieve you of your workload. By sharing your portfolio, you can earn money.
All of the websites mentioned in this post are available for testing. The majority of them are inclusive. This implies that you can increase your audience by uploading the same photograph to many networks.
You can earn more money for each image on non-stock websites, but it could take more effort. One such example is Etsy, which demands that you print & distribute the pictures yourself. It requires a lot of time, work, and energy. The payout, however, may be superior to stock photos provided you have patience.
Frequently Asked Questions
It’s comparatively easy. To submit your first batch of photographs for review, you must register as a contributor on the agency’s website. All respectable agencies provide very clear sign-up instructions and comprehensive submission criteria that cover topics like preferred file formats, min and max file sizes, technical quality standards, content that is currently in high demand, etc.
You sign up in the contributor section of a stock picture website and upload sample photos. You can begin adding photographs to their library as soon as your submission has been accepted.
Nothing. The majority of trustworthy stock photo websites don’t charge you anything to register as a contributor & submit your work.
Yes, if you do have the photographic talent, the leisure time, and the perseverance needed to develop a significant portfolio and generate enough revenue.
Since iStock is indeed a microstock website, it offers low royalties and low selling prices for photographs. Starting out with a 15% cut of each sale, you can increase that to 25% to 40% if you’re an exclusive contributor.
