In recent years the quality of digital cameras has been increasing incredibly quickly. This has meant that it is now possible for many amateur photographers to produce great professional quality photographs. This combined with the spread of the Internet has created way for amateur photographers to become freelance photographers by selling the rights to use their images via stock photography websites.
What are stock photos?
A stock photograph is one that is licensed to be used for commercial purposes. Their are literally thousands of designers, magazines, publishers, webmasters and artists out there that need to buy photographs to use in their work or publications. When you register your images with a stock agency the agency will sell the license to use these images. In return they will pay you a percentage of the license fee charged.
Most stock images are sold as “royalty free” meaning that a one off payment is made to the agency (and indirectly the photographer) for which the buyer effectively buys a copy of the image. There are no ongoing fees or commissions (royalties)
What kind of Images Can i Sell?
Well, that all depends on what kind of photos people want to buy. If you browse any of the photos on the main stock agency websites you will soon see that there are almost an unlimited variety of photos for sale. That said many of the agencies have an approval process that filter out poor quality images that obviously will not sell.
As well as quality and resolution of photos many of the agencies publish lists of the kind of images they are in short supply of. This is a great place to start when thinking about the kind of images you should upload.
Virtually all sites have restrictions around the content of photos. Obviously porn or gratuitously violent images are out of the question. In addition virtually all require you to accompany uploads of photos containing recognizable people with a model release form (proving you have the models consent to sell the photo).
Where Can I start Selling My Photos?
Below is a list of some of the most popular and successful stock agencies you can register with and start uploading photos today.
iStockPhoto
This is perhaps the daddy of stock photography agencies. The standards are kept high meaning it is harder to get photographs accepted here than at some of the other agencies however once you get accepted the rewards can be high.
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Fotolia
Fotolia is up there with the very biggest of stock agencies, despite being a relative new player in the market. Though we feel the site layout is a little unclear they have a huge number of subscribers and offer good commission rates. Exact rates are dependent on the type of license sold though at the time of writing they were very competitive.
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Dreamstime
Dreamstime was born in 2000 as a specialist Royalty Free stock photography website. Commissions increase as your number of downloads increase. The site is really well laid out (our favorite from this perspective) making navigation and account maintenance easy.
Best of all Dreamstime really emphasis the community of photographers supplying their images by providing a free community platform where users can blog and chat to discuss their successes on the site.
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Thanks for sharing with us! Don’t forget other sites like http://www.123rf.com . It’s give 50% of the revenue and their uploading feature is much more easy.