If you have a stockpile of photos stored away on an old hard drive or if you’re a photographer with a portfolio of professional photos then you should be putting them to use and earning some extra income from them. On the other hand if you’re looking for stock photos for a project of your own and you’re on a tight budget, then check out Monoimages.com for free high resolution, black and white photos.
Why You Should Sell Your Photos
As a user, stock photography websites allow you to search for photos and download them to use for projects such as on a blog post or in a magazine. Depending on what you choose to use them for you need to buy the corresponding license such as commercial or personal, and these all have their own prices.
The money you earn on most stock websites is quite small on a per image download basis and can even be lower than $1, but the upside of this is you’ll sell a lot more of them and then your earnings will stack up, especially when you have thousands of images uploaded. But if you’re concerned about the small commissions then you’ll be happy to hear that some photographers (although not often) earn $1000’s from a single image over time.
The Process
Finding a stock photography website is simple, just do a google search for “stock photos” and all the top ones should be on the first page or two. One thing I would recommend doing though is researching and reading some blog posts to find which are the best and most popular ones to use because each stock site offers different commission rates and these can vary a lot. But you don’t have to upload them all to just one website, you can use a few different sites if you want, but make sure you first check the terms and if you’ve given exclusivity to any websites for any of your images.
Preparing Your Photos
It’s not quite as simple as uploading your photos and waiting for the commissions to fly in your bank account, there’s a bit of preparation you need to do beforehand. First you need to decide on the type of photos you’re going to shoot, because certain types of photography sell better than others, and some might not even sell at all if there’s no demand for them. And you might be thinking that you need really artistic, original shots worthy of hanging on your wall, but in reality the majority of people aren’t buying the photos for this, and the ones that sell are often simple photos, for example a dog or plant.
Choosing only your best photos is important because not all your photos will be suitable and you’ll find a lot of stock websites won’t allow you to sell any below their standards and they’ll simply reject them. Another thing to take into account is the images need to be at a high resolution and without any blur, so it’s important you have a good camera for this. Investing in some photo editing software such as Lightroom or Photoshop is a good idea so you can tweak things such as the sharpness and saturation so your photos are the best they can be.
Increasing Your Earnings
If you’ve already started selling your photos and you’re disappointed that you’re either earning nothing or very little then the most likely reason is you’re uploading the wrong type of photos that there’s no demand for, or you have a very small portfolio of photos. You can’t make a decent wage off just a few photos, you need to aim for a thousand or more as a minimum.