Are you a photographer and want to sell your photos?
Even if you are an amateur photographer, and you have some good quality photos, here’s your chance to make money off of them.
Dreamstime is a good stock photography company that will buy your photos and then you get a commission off of every sale. You will make anywhere from $1-17 depending on what kind of user buys your photo.
The great thing about it is that this is considered passive income, because you just upload your photos and let the money accumulate. You don’t have to do anything, as Dreamstime does all the marketing for you.
Every month, I do suggest you do a keyword investigative search on Google to see what people are searching for. Then take pictures that would compliment that area of interest, because the odds are that graphic web designers will be searching for those types of photos too.
Remember that for any photos with people in them, you have to get model releases, otherwise you can’t sell them.
Here is the criteria you need to adhere to before uploading your photos:
- the photos must be your personal work and you must own the copyright upon everything within it
- the photos must be of least 3MP resolution
- the photos must be RGB, saved at the highest JPG quality (100% or level 12)
- the photos have a Model Release for all recognizable people in your image. The model release files must be JPEG or PDF, filenames must contain only letters and numbers, no special characters.
- the photos for traced illustrations upload the original image in the Property Release area (if it is not the case you should mention the illustration is your own work, created from scratch, in the notify admins area)
- the photos check carefully for copyright issues such as labels, logos, characters from cartoons or movies etc. Note that some buildings are protected by a trademark (such as new sculptures), cars like Ferrari and Porsche, Harley Davidson motorcycles, the Coca-Cola bottle, the Olympic logo circles.
- the photos check the image for all the faults listed in these guidelines
- don’t upload offensive content such as explicit nudes, drugs, people in offensive positions, racism
- add a relevant description to your image longer than one word explaining the image. Now this is a very important one. You have to think very carefully of what a person would search for to land on your photo. I’ve often come across photos I like that were in the WRONG place on a stock photography site. I can’t even imagine how many sales a photographer loses because he/she picked the wrong keywords for their photo. Also remember that lay people generally use adjectives like “sexy woman”, not just “woman.”
- don’t use all caps for the image name and description
