Selling digital photos on microstock photography websites
There are an ever increasing number of websites which allow photographers, both amateur and professional, to sell stock photography images online with a minimum of fuss and hassle. This page chronicles my ongoing experiment with selling some of my own photos on some of these sites.
| Site | Royalty | Size Requirement | Trial Photos |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dreamstime | $0.25-$2.00 | min 3MP | None. Start uploading immediately |
| Fotolia | $0.33-$1.00 | min 2MP | None. Start uploading immediately |
| Big Stock Photo | $0.50-? | min 800px, max 10,000Kb | None. Start uploading immediately. Upload queue closes sometimes when there is a backlog. |
| iStockphoto | $0.20-$1.00 | min 2MP | Upload 3 photos |
| Can Stock Photo | $0.25+ | min 3MP | Upload 3 photos |
| Lucky Oliver | $0.30-$1.20 | min 1600x1200 (2MP) | Upload 3 photos |
| StockXpert | $0.50-$1.50 | min 800x600 | Upload 5 photos |
| Shutterstock | $0.25 | min 4MP | Upload 10 photos, 7 must be accepted |
| 123 Royalty Free | $0.10-$0.30 | min 4MP (2200x1700) | Upload 10 photos |
| Featurepics | Self-set | min 800x800 | None. Start uploading immediately |
Approval Process
It can take from days to weeks for a human to approve submitted photos after they have been uploaded.
My rejections so far:
- Dreamstime: 1 overfiltered
- BigStockPhoto: 1 graininess/noise
Purchasing my photos
If you are interested in perusing my photos on any site in particular, whether to buy one or to see what kind of photos got accepted, you can do so using these links:
Keyword Management
After running into a few problems, I got the MacOS distribution of the cross-platform ProStockMaster running just fine on my Linux machine by running it with:
AWT_TOOLKIT=MToolkit java -Xms64m -Xmx256m -jar psm.jar
ProStockMaster understands JPG files but not raw files. So you need to do everything that you would normally do to prepare a high quality, high resolution JPG file for upload on your own. Once that file exists, you can open it in ProStockMaster and give it a title, description and keywords. ProStockMaster then writes that metadata into the JPG file using the appropriate IPTC tags.
It also knows how to upload images to eight different stock photo sites.
Another option is the perl program exiftool
