make cash with stock
How you can make money from all the great photos you’ve already taken
Today, there are many professional photographers who will tell you that stock photography is dead. But that isn’t the case at all. True, the market for stock images has changed dramatically over recent years. In the ‘good old days’, you could get good returns from a few images – but with the proliferation of images and low-cost ‘microstock’ sites, nowadays the returns per sale of individual images can be extremely low. This means that making an income from stock images is now mostly about getting many lower-return sales, rather than a few bigger ones.
Do your research
There are many stock libraries that could sell your images, so you need to do some research to find the right one for you. You should check that the library wants the type of images that you can supply, and then make sure that your images will meet their guidelines. Most of the larger libraries will then require you to register, and submit a small number of images for approval. This process is critical, so make sure that you only submit your very best images. Once these have been accepted, you will be able to upload more, although some libraries still have a limit of the number you can submit per week or per month.
Once you have started to upload your images to the site, your work doesn’t stop there. The first thing you need to do, with some sites, is to decide on how your images will be sold. There are two main ways that libraries license images, which can affect how much money you will get for them. These are royalty-free (RF) and rightsmanaged (RM).
With royalty-free licensing, the buyer pays a single fee that allows them to use the image multiple times and for any length of time, but the image is still available to other buyers to use. Rights-managed licensing gives the buyer exclusive use of the image for a limited time and number of uses. What this means for you is that a royalty-free image will bring you less money per sale, but has the potential to be sold many more times, while a rights-managed image will command a higher price per sale, but will potentially achieve fewer sales. So you need to choose a library that