selling photos online

[david_mcgillivray]

Hi

 

Does anybody have any info on selling photos online? Which is a good site to sell them through? Any info

would be most appreciated.

 

Thanks

 

David

[miklosphoto]

There are two ways to that:

1. As stock photography: http://www.istockphoto.com/ - this is just one example

2. Customers can actually order prints:

see my forum post on it from yesterday: http://www.photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=00I7Sw

 

Miklos

[mikael_karlsson]

Instead of pretty much giving your images away at micro-payment sites like istock have a look at agencies like alamy.com, where are least you get decent money for the images when they're licensed.

[stevenseelig]

I have used www.printroom.com for photo fulfilment for clients. If I charge enough the

overhead drops to about 18% or I get 82% of the sale price. The take the order, print and

ship to customer...and once a month they send me check.

 

I am not sure how visible it is to the general web/crawls/bots, etc...so you don't how much

visibility you really have.

 

steven

[fraser_harding]

These basics you MUST understand before choosing a site to help you sell images:

 

There are three main ways of selling images - Rights Managed, Royalty Free, and as Prints.

 

All three ways involve the real 'stuff' of selling images, which is copyright - your images are your Intellectual Property (IP);

 

If you sell prints, you are licensing the use of the print, not the right to reproduce the image.

 

If you sell Royalty Free (RF), you are generally selling multiple, uncontrolled licenses to reproduce the image as much as the licensee needs.

 

If you sell Rights Managed (RM), you are licensing the right to use the image in a very specific, controlled manner that gives the licensee reasonably protected use of the image.

 

So, if you sell using the RF model, the value of each license is reduced hugely because you need to sell a huge number of licenses to make any money (keep in mind that most micro stock libraries keep about 80% of the revenue generated by each image, so you could sell an image 1000 times and make $200.00).

 

RF suits low quality images that are easy to make, as the revenue generated is likely to be very low.

 

RM on the other hand suits higher quality images, that have cost more to make, or are 'rarer' in some way. By sellin RM, you are increasing the value of the image to the potential licensees, by restricting its 'exposure' (so you could sell an image once, and make anywhere between $500.00 - $20,000.00 for a single use), the value of the image being defined by the use it is put to - an image used in a small country church brochure is obviously worth much less than a full page ad in Vogue (which costs $80,000.00 for the space).

 

The trick of course is to make the most out of any given image considering its relative uniqueness, without pricing yourself outta the market....

 

You should only choose sites fore-armed with basic knowledge of what it is you are REALLY selling (What types of images and Licenses), and researching long and hard (by looking at websites, and learning how they value their images), so that you have an understanding of what value you are offering.

 

Fraser

[kelly_flanigan1]

Once you give/sell/lend/loan you high res images to a client, they are going to get it printed. You really have no control of what they are going to do with the image, no matter what the legal mumbo jumb says. This happens ALL THE TIME with wedding images. Folks bring in unmarked, non watermarked, no-contact info in the digital header files to printers, and want copies. Often lay photogrpher do this as proofs, because they dont understand printing requirements, or are to lazy to try to add any way of contacting the photographer. They folks get posters, large prints, T shirts, coffee mugs, a zillion copies off these proofs. You really want to try to add contact info, and price your work to make a profit, and not abandon the images like most folks do. Some folks just come to printers with web links where we download the images to use, and we dont really know who own them. Its always the same story, old uncle Bob from Iceland shot these, he use to be a pro in the Navy. :)