5 Stock Photography Sites That Pay For Your Photos

Sell Photos Online – Finding Sites That Pay for Your Photos

If you are a budding photographer, the opportunity to sell your pictures is an incredible opportunity.  Who does not want to get paid for doing what they love?  It is important to find legitimate sites that pay for photos if you really want to turn your photography into an extra source of income, or something more.  Here are a few of the more popular stock photography sites that pay for your photos.

Top Five Websites That You Can Sell Photos Too

1.    BigStockPhoto.com – This website is home to millions of images and signing up is quite easy. It is free to sign up as a BigStockPhoto.com contributor.  You will need to go through a Contributor Tutorial before you start uploading your pictures.  After you upload your photo a trained team will review the photos.  Depending on what you take a picture of, there may be releases that need to be filled out in conjunction with the picture.  If the images are usable they will be uploaded to the site, and you get to keep the copyrights.  For certain purchases you receive 30% of the purchase price.  If customers buy your image on credit you receive $.50 for every credit used and this money can be withdrawn after it reaches $30.

2.    Alamy.com – This is one of the largest stock photos sites out there for paid photo contributions. You can turn your photos into a fairly lucrative business if you understand how the process works on Alamy.  The company offers one of the best payouts in the industry with a 60% royalty per photograph.  There are about 25 million images on Alamy so clients do have a lot of images to choose from.  Like most sites, you retain the copyright on the photographs and the right to do any editorial work.  The Alamy network allows you to get your photographs in the hands of overseas distributors that are much harder to reach as an independent photographer.

3.    CreStock.com – This site is designed more to give photographers the tools to give their creativity full rein.  It is free to open up a CreStock account.  The site offers a nice portfolio system for organizing your images on the website.  As with most stock photography websites, there is an upload agreement that you must submit to before you start uploading your images.  CreStock pays 20-30% royalty per image, which is on the lower end for stock photography sites, but the creative tools that you get to access are top notch.

4.    FeaturePics.com – For the more budget conscious client looking for a photo, the prices on FeaturePics are a bit lower than many of the other stock photography sites.  That does not mean that the photographer does not get paid though.  The site pays 50% of the license fee to the photographer.  You do have to wait for your account to accrue at least $50 before you can request that your earnings be sent to you.  There is also a 7-day holding period on funds after a sale is completed.

5.    Dreamstime.com – This site is incredibly selective about what gets added to their database, so you should not be surprised if some of your images are rejected.  The review board will tell you why the photo was rejected though, so you can improve it and resubmit it at a later time.  The benefit of their selectivity is that they have high sales rates, so if your picture or pictures are selected then you will likely be making money in a relatively short period of time.  Before you can start submitting your photos for review, you must fill out an application.  Once a photo is downloaded a certain amount of times, then it moves up to a higher rate level.  Photographers receive 30-50% of the price and an additional 10% if it is an exclusive image.

Now You Know a Little More About Where to Sell Photos Online

Photography can be quite profitable if you know how to get your photos into the hands of the right people.  The Internet has opened up a world of opportunity to amateur photographers to get their photographs viewed by a much wider audience.  As you break into selling your photos on stock photography websites, it is important to understand that you may need to upload your photos on a few different sites to help you get a jumpstart at selling.  After using a few different sites you will likely decide that one is your favorite, and you may want to begin to use the site exclusively.  Why not get paid for doing what you love?

I've got an even bigger list of sites that will pay for photos. See my post, Making Money Selling Your Photographs and Images to check out this list.