Anyone have experience with selling photos?

[Cwadda]

I'm looking to sell images online and was wondering the best way to do it. I have a good collection on Flickr with about 7k followers but I worry about all the fine print in the stock photo/licensing companies.

Thanks!

[mtn]

Timely thread. Last night uploaded a bunch of my wife's old photos to an app that supposedly sells them to Getty. One sale of one photo nets $5.

I doubt a single one sells, but it took a solid 10 minutes of effort and the next time around won't even take that. We'll give it a shot for a few months. If we get a single sale, we'll probably keep doing it.

[Axecleaver]

Saw something about this on one of the side gig threads floating around. I'm just an amateur, gave it a shot a year ago and registered on the two biggest sites (Getty and iStockPhoto). Spent a few hours uploading content I shot in Hawaii and my garden in upstate NY. Sold exactly nothing. I think the sweet spot for these is finding sufficiently narrow subject areas that folks need to populate their clickbait news articles, or other web image consumers. What those narrow subject areas are, with their corresponding magic search words, is beyond me.

[mathjak107]

my wife and i are semi-pro . we maintain a website from smugmug and sell from off our site .  we get all kinds of traffic from postings on forums , websites and company's we did work for .

we shot all kinds of things but bugs , animals  and flowers sell the most . i will post a few of ours .

[Miss Piggy]

I'm one of the picky buyers of stock photos. There are just sooooooo many to choose from!

I buy photos for my online training courses. For me, the photos need to "support" the training topic/content. For example, I might search for someone at the cash register or someone on the phone for a customer service course. Or I might search for "team" for new employee training. It's pretty random, really, but I generally have something vaguely in mind when I do a search, and generally speaking, the photos need to have people in them (for my purposes). For the photographer, I'm sure it's a crapshoot.

[mathjak107]

here are a few examples of our work. we just love photography , the fact we sell anything is secondary

[ketchup]

My GF is a pro photographer and once sold a photo (from a previously-done photoshoot) to Purina (they contacted her) to use in a magazine ad for dog food.  I think she got about $250 for it, but knows she could have gotten more.

So maybe find a big company that advertises something related to your subject matter and contact them to see if they're interested.  Probably the niche-ier the better (less competition).

[LeRainDrop]

here are a few examples of our work. we just love photography , the fact we sell anything is secondary

Wow, you have great talent!

[mathjak107]

I don't know about great talent but we do crank out some purdy pictures lol.

My wife is in to it too. It is good and bad .it is good because the competition is fun. But the bad news is we need two of everything .

Even worse is the fact we have no adult supervision. There is no one to tell us don't buy a new lens or camera body.  Not only that we buy 2 .

I won 5k in a contest so i decided to buy a 3k nikon d800 body. I was giving the rest to my wife. So when i went for the body she decided she wanted a new camera too.

So now with that we wanted some different lenses. By the time we checked out we had 9k worth of stuff. The store thought the credit card was stolen and they called the bank to call the card owner to verify they were buying all this stuff .

My cell phone rang in the store when the bank called .it was funny

[K-ice]

Never "sell" an image. Just licence it.  That is all I know.

[mathjak107]

We sell prints and tee shirts as well as all kinds of stuff with our images imprinted. Some of my shots come in an hdr software package as samples

[Cwadda]

Well it sounds like stock photo sites are super competitive and saturated with competition already.

I work for a company that does scientific imaging, so I don't think that would be so much in demand...
Here's our album, and I'm not trying to solicit...but wanted some advice from fellow photographers on how to sell images.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/107963674@N07/albums


Nice work, Mathjak!

[elaine amj]

I buy some stock photos. Still have lots of trouble finding photos that meet our needs. And hiring photographers is $$ (we have to suck it up and do it occasionally though). Photos that tell a story from a marketing perspective is brutally difficult to find.


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[kudy]

I have a blog where I post cloud photos - over the years I've occasionally sold them to folks (highest payment, $250). If you have your own website, you can use fotomoto.com to easily "sell" without creating an ecommerce store, but for the most part my sales have come from people emailing asking to license photos.

I've considered a few other avenues for selling, but not tried anything.

My mom photographs lots of dragonflies, interesting to hear that insects sell well.

[mathjak107]

we don't bother with the popular commercial sites . they are over saturated with stuff . a lot of it sucks too. it is amazing what people post and think someone will buy .a lot look like snap shots that are unfinished products

[gooki]

Istockphoto and shutterstock are/were the big players. Should be easy to create an account and upload away.

[mathjak107]

I buy some stock photos. Still have lots of trouble finding photos that meet our needs. And hiring photographers is $$ (we have to suck it up and do it occasionally though). Photos that tell a story from a marketing perspective is brutally difficult to find.


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what kind of photo's do you buy ?

[elaine amj]

Mostly people shots - those are the most difficult for us to secure. We are in a very specific niche (tourism marketing) so need shots of people doing things. Usually people eating, families laughing, people doing activities, ladies/couples drinking wine/beer. We always prefer authentic photos in our location, but models are challenging/expensive so most of our photos don't have people in them and we often have to turn to stock to fill in the gaps. And when we're constantly putting together ads/guides/brochures - its so easy to run out of photography. And VERY difficult to find the photos that tell the story we want to tell.

e.g. we were putting together something to advertise for motorcoach travel. Almost impossible to find pics of a bunch of tourists with a motorcoach in the photo that's actually in our destination (and the tour companies rarely have the budget/expertise to get really good photos when they are out and about). We'd have to stage something and that can get expensive. So we turn to stock and do the best we can.

[mathjak107]

nothing we do   , but if you need bugs ,flowers , bridges, some landscapes   and animals , i got thousands of those   lol .

we recently went to the old red mill in clinton nj . great place to shoot .