Best Place To Sell Stock Photos

 

Let us know in the social networks comments, if there is a website that we could have included here and is missing or if there is a website that should not appear in this list.

Fotolia

Now this website has about 5 million users. This company belongs to Adobe. It pays royalties up to 50% starting from about 20%.
Whereas there are other sites that you have to wait 30 days until you reach a milestone, or a threshold to receive your payment, here the royalties are paid into your account right at the moment the operation is concluded.
This is a site that has been in service for more than 10 years and has about 50 million pictures.
The advantage of this website, and one of the main reasons we want to include it in this updated list, is that when you upload your photo to this service, it is also added to all the other websites of the Adobe environment. Therefore your prospective customers come by your photos outside this website too and within any of the other software packages from Adobe: they can buy your photo inside Illustrator, InDesign or inside Photoshop as well.

Alamy

This website has about 95 million quality stock images also. It is in terms of quantity probably one of the largest stock photo collection. The reason why this is number one is because photographers obtain 50% of royalty payment for each photo that is being sold on the website. Also this site does not require an exclusivity contract to be signed. This means that you can sell your pictures also in other sites as well, so it seems a very convenient solution right now this could be the first and best option in 2017. This is better for you because more customers come here to buy photos and with such a high traffic, it is more possible that they find yours here.

500px

 

This website is more like a community for photographers. Photographers come here to showcase their photographs. It is not known outside the photographers community whereas Flickr is known by everyone.

We have noticed that there is a shift in the direction that this website is undertaking. It has started like a website for a social community for advanced photographers and it is steering towards a photography marketplace where you can make yourself known professionally and sell your photos.

An advantage of this website is that, unlike many other sites in this list, you do not have to give away your photos in order to upload them and the rights still belong to you. Your photos can be used for advertisement purposes of the website but that is all.

The site is not so well positioned as Flickr in terms of keywords and search engine optimization though for the general public, that will first search for Flickr in Google search engine. In comparison, also Flickr has a better domain authority.

This website is still considered a photographer community probably superior to Flickr, from the point of view of the experienced photographer, and not so much as a marketplace so for this reason we will not include it in one of the first places in our list.

You can have a paid account but also the options for a free account are very strong and suitable for beginners.

Shutterstock

This website is one of the historical and probably the oldest to offer stock photos. This website has payed more than 400 million dollar to all the contributors, to all the photographers, that post their photos therein.

The most notorious advantage of this website is that it has huge traffic, so many businesses will come directly to buy here and cater the complete digital photography marketplace.

Here in this marketplace, you still keep the copyright of your pictures and you can earn about 30% of the price of your photo. Now this depends on the size thereof. The payment is something between 50 cent of a dollar with a maximum of roughly $30 for each picture sold.

IStock Photo

In this website there is a standard royalty that actually will start from 15% per download but this can increase up to 40%. This percentage depends on several criteria, basically regarding the popularity of the photos, so if a customer for example purchases a picture using one of the subscription credits that the website has, royalty rates are about 15 to 20% by default.

If you decide to grant them an exclusivity contract, your royalties can boost from 22% to 45% This exclusivity contract might be terminated if you want, but you have to tender them a 30 days notice period. This clause is very usual in all exclusivity contracts.

We can have a conclusion that this website is very good if you are just starting out just your way in earning money with digital photography, because it has very popular forums. You can have a lot of traffic here and you will understand better especially at the beginning how the world of photo stock sites work so keep this one as a key option if you are a beginner.

Photoshelter

The most interesting feature about this website is that you can sell the photographs through your own site. This feature is more towards advanced photographers and is orients the platform to an e-commerce kind of business.

Cloud storage for all your photographs is possible. It also has an interesting interface and some basic search engine optimization. Likewise there are also several social media integration that you can consider as an important benefit. What we find in this model in comparison with other similar websites, is that you have complete control about how your pictures, your photos, are displayed and for example, you can avoid to have your the pictures, the photos, of your competitors displayed alongside your own products.

Photomoolah

Now this is a different way to sell photos because this is a website where you submit your photos to different kind of contests. If the picture you posted the picture you propose if picked a winner or as one of the winners you can obtain your payment and retain your rights.

This website is less popular than others so there is less competition for any photographer. I the aforementioned contests, you can earn 100 to 500 dollars, but the average that we will see here is between 150 and $250.

This is not one of preferred options as we prefer a traditional marketplace so it is not one of our top picks.

Smug Mug 

This website is an alternative to Photoshelter because it offers some kind of e-commerce platform. you can here showcase your entire stock of photos in a storefront that is easy to customize and from here you can manage your order. We are including this website in this list because you can use it to offer books greeting cards or any kind of print directly created from your shirts so it is very easy for the customer to handle everything inside the website also it has very good analytics and the you will keep 85% of your revenue so you can go your own marketing and keep 85% of the price that seems that he gets along with the websites we have reviewed here

Can Stock Photo

This website is interesting because it offers you up to 50% of royalties and you can you withdraw your money into PayPal account as soon as your money balance reaches $50.

We have noticed here, as a special feature of this website, that here it is very easy to upload photos in batches when you have a stock of possibly thousand units. It is very easy and user friendly. At the same time you can optimize your keywords automatically because it reads very well the metadata so here it is an advantage with other sites where you have to maintain the keywords individually.

However, we have noticed that before your photographs are published, you need to be approved first by the website. Nevertheless, we also found that this is a simple process because you just need to submit 3 photos to the Editors of the website. The response from this editorial review comes within 48 hours so it is not a big problem at all.

Despite the editorial review, something that your prospective customers will appreciate, we find that this site an interesting option because of the high royalties that you will keep.

123RF

This website has now than 70 million photographs in their files, and it has been growing incredibly in the last year. The royalties paid are between 30 and 70% and this payment depends on the level of contribution of the photographer, meaning that if you upload a large quantity of photos your payout will be higher than if you upload less than 250 pictures to this website. This is website is a good option for photographers that have a very large stock of photos.

Dreamstime

This website has a review over the material that is uploaded. This means that their website editors review the photos after they are uploaded and before publishing them to ensure that it meets some basic quality standards. This is a guarantee of quality for the customers because they consider that this editorial review can help to ensure quality and the fulfillment of some technical and aesthetic standards.

After the photos from the photographer are approved by this editorial review, you might get between 25 and 60%. However this 60% corresponds to you only if you sign with them a contract of exclusivity.
This website is also an interesting option to consider because royalties can go up to 50% in the majority of the cases.

Please note that this website claims to be the world’s largest stock photography community but actually by the numbers this statement is not correct.

Snapped 4U

This website can be used as a repository to sell photos that you have take shut at events like festival a wedding party or a gig so you upload the photos here and you can simply Direct your customers or your prospective customers to this website through a link for this service the website will take only 50 cent of a dollar if the price of the picture is less than $5 if the photograph is sold at more than $5 the website will charge you in this case with the commission of 10% included this website here in the list at the end but we do not see that you have a real added value it would be preferable to have your own website and send the link to your prospective customers of your own website new advantage that we can see in this website and that is why we include is it here in this list it’s because it gives you a card and everything just on the go so you don’t have to worry about anything you just upload your photos so consider this option if you work independently

Fine Art America

Probably we should not include this website as it is not completely devoted to photography. Let us know in the comments what do you think.

In this website that you can sell not only photos but also other kinds of prints. This includes digital art, paintings, posters, acrylic prints, and metal prints so there are different kind of products. It claims to have an estate of ten million properties but only a part of them are photographs.