I recently became aware of some sites where you can upload and you have the potential to sell your pictures. The site my friend has been using was www.Fotolia.com so I checked it out and uploaded 10 pictures, unfortunately all were rejected for various reasons. I was just wondering if anyone else has had good experience with said website or even others?
Any input is appreciated
@ayearinthelifeof out of the 10 I got 3 generic emails either saying they were poor quality, technical reasons or due to copyright infringement, none of which go into detail of why...
I had a go at this but found that you had no chance of selling anything but had to pay for the right to own your own photos check the small print I handed the coppyright over to a second party only to recieve nothing...once you hand over your capture you literly no longer own it....they sell your work and you recieve a sorry but this item is not ......My advise is find a local gallery, market ,shop who are willing to sell your pics let your work speak for itself......sorry for the rant..:-/
I used iStockPhoto. You have to take a tough quiz on copyright and what makes a good photo / things to avoid. Then they let you submit some trial photos and it took me 2 goes to pass that. After that I tried to upload some photos and discovered that you have to tag and tag and tag to get the image uploaded. I gave up at that point. You can make money doing this, but make sure there are no people or brands in your shot and the quality is excellent. And remember its what people want to buy not want you want to shoot that matters if you want to excahnge pixels for cash.
Entering photo competitions or sending images to magazine can be an easier way of getting some cash or recognition.
@heathen25 Thats the large and small of it! With so many photographers now owning cameras with enough pixels to give them the resolutions they want all looking to earn a few quid doing what they enjoy the stock market is hard these days.
Selling stock photos is a numbers game. You dont earn much per shot but you have to have tens of thousands of stock images out there to earn any kind of money. And they have to be all top of the line in quality and content. Yuri Arcurs is the top selling stock guy that i have read about and he earns 10 million dollars a year on istockphoto. He also has a staff of 100 people and uploads thousands of pictures a day. Everything i have read is that it is incredibly difficult to make any type of real money in stock images anymore.
I applied to iStockPhoto, and have a few shots available for upload over there. First you have to take a quiz, then upload some sample pictures. If they accept you as a contributor, every shot you upload gets reviewed, which can take up to 2 weeks......if it's not approved they'll tell you the reason why.
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Entering photo competitions or sending images to magazine can be an easier way of getting some cash or recognition.
Bigstock,
Canstock and the iStockPhoto mentioned by Paul above ... but agree with all comments re magazines and publications being a better method