Even without an expensive camera, you may earn a respectable sum of money by selling your images online, regardless of whether you’re a professional photographer or just enjoy taking pictures in your free time. Actually, you have a good chance if you have a steady hand and a good phone camera.
No matter how you shoot your pictures, there are more and more ways to make money off of them. From selling your Instagram stock to going all out and creating a photo book, there are a ton of other methods to hone your photography abilities (and make money).
How to use stock libraries to sell photographs online
Digital images are purchased and sold by stock libraries for usage on websites, in books, on merchandise, and even in advertisements. The photographer receives a portion of each transaction.
One excellent approach to get passive money is by selling images on stock sites, where you may upload a picture once and sell it repeatedly for almost indefinite periods of time.
To contribute to an online stock photo library, you might need to submit a selection of images (and be accepted). Following that, some websites will keep going through all of your entries and will gladly reject those that don’t fit their requirements.
This implies that choosing your best shots will constantly require you to stay alert. However, don’t obsess over rejections. To gain the most coverage, sign up for several stock photo websites and upload images to each one.
Top websites for online photo sales
Try these stock picture companies to sell photos online and earn as much money as you can:
Alamy
To start selling stock pictures, we advise using Alamy first. For two years, you will receive 100% of the sales price of your photos through their student contributor program. Although many UK schools are already registered, your university must be included in the program.
Generally speaking, photos on Alamy sell for around £25 each, but depending on their intended usage, they can fetch anywhere from £15 to £400.
If you’re on the platinum tier, the payout is still a respectable 50% for photographs that are exclusive to Alamy, even if you’re not a student or your university isn’t registered (you get less for non-exclusive images). You get a 20% commission when you sell phone photos via their Stockimo app (available only in the App Store).
Picfair
The unique feature of Picfair is that you get to choose how much your photos fetch. Naturally, people are more inclined to purchase your photos if you set the price lower. However, this site is perfect if you have some excellent photos that are worthy of high fees.
If your picture sells, you get the sales price you selected, plus 20% for Picfair’s portion.
EyeEm
EyeEm would appear if Instagram and Alamy had a child together. Although EyeEm is a photo-sharing website, you may also sell your photos through the marketplace if you’d like to make more money than just “likes.”
Depending on how much money you’ve made on the site during the past 12 months, you would receive 50% of picture purchases.
Additionally, there are frequent how-to articles and brand-sponsored themed tasks on EyeEm. Additionally, you can upload pictures from your phone or computer.
Foap
Foap, which is available for free on the App Store and Android, is designed with phone photographers in mind. After deducting any taxes and fees, Foap shares the proceeds 50/50 from the sale of photographs, which typically fetch between £7 and £8.
They also regularly hold missions where you can enter to earn extra cash and benefits by submitting images with a theme.
DREAMSTIME
Exclusive contributors can receive up to 60% from Dreamstime.
The more times your photo is downloaded, the more money it brings in. Novice photos can get as much as £0.27.
Start with the free Dreamstime app (available on iPhone and Android) if you’re selling photos taken with a phone.
Getty Images
15% of an image’s sales price is sent to Getty Images, but they guarantee a larger part (between 25% and 45%) if you make the image exclusive to the website.
Although a single image may fetch several hundred pounds, the calculation of your slice depends on the kind of license or subscription plan the consumer purchases.
Shutterstock
One of the most well-known stock photo websites to sell to is Shutterstock. Your lifetime earnings—the total amount you have made as a contributor on Shutterstock—and the type of license or subscription you choose will determine how much you will make per photo.
Keep in mind that when you first start contributing to Shutterstock, you will only get paid 15% to 40% for each image sold.
Your proportion will increase with the number of sales you make in a given year. However, this changes at the start of the year, and you will once again be paid 15% for each image until you sell more.
