Guide to selling your digital photos online

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Make money from your digital camera selling photos online

Have you ever been seduced by the idea of getting paid for your photos? If yes, there are some good news for you. It's now easier than ever to earn extra money from your photographs by selling them online.

How to sell your photos online?

Internet is redefining the traditional stock photo market, when photographers had to negotiate with stock photo agencies and send negatives through the mail to sell their work. These days most images are sold online and downloaded by buyers instantly. You can just upload your digital files to online agencies, many of which are friendly to amateur photographers. You don't have to be a pro to sell your photos online but to be successful your shots need to be high-quality photographs and available in high resolution format.

What Is Stock Photography?

Stock photos are used by graphic artists, book publishers, advertising agencies, in Web sites, magazines, newspapers, corporate publications, and more. The same image can be sold many times, because buyers don't get exclusive rights.

Stock photography includes images of people, animals, objects, landscapes, buildings, and events that can be sold to and used by a wide variety of media outlets.

Popular stock photos on Dreamstime

Online Stock Photo Agencies

Stock photo agencies are sometimes referred to as photo archives, picture libraries, or image banks.

The sites listed below are known as 'micro stock' sites, they allow anyone from the amateur to the professional photographer to sell images easily. These sites take images from individual contributors, and photographer gets a commission for each image sold.

Micro stock agencies sell royalty-free images starting at as low as $1, and while the fees on each image are low - typically less than a dollar on each sale - the companies sell large volumes of images. The mindset of micro stock is that quantity will prevail and the photographers will end up making as much from many small sales as they would from a few large sales on a traditional stock photography site. Quality and quantity of your images will determine how much you will earn.

Example of stock photos for sale on Dreamstime

These sites are appealing to beginning photographers providing a great way to get exposure of your work, to improve your skills, and to get to the professional level of selling photographs. Micro stock sites typically offer message boards, peer feedback, and charts of which images are selling best. All these sites are free to sign up and don't charge anything for hosting your photos.

Through some of these stock photo agencies you can also sell your vector illustrations and video.

Whether you want to sell or buy photos, we suggest you to start with these agencies:

Dreamstime	To sell your photos: Sell your photos and get 50-80% from each sale you make.	To buy photos: Huge collection of Royalty-Free stock photography. High-resolution stock images can reach as low as $0.38 each. Thousands of stock photos added weekly!
Shutterstock	To sell your photos, Illustrations and videos: Submit your photos, Illustrations and videos to Shutterstock and get paid every time one of your photos is downloaded. Shutterstock will pay you 30 cents every time one of your images is downloaded. At just 2000 downloads/month, you can earn $500 (US) per month.	To buy photos, Illustrations and videos: Shutterstock is the largest subscription-based stock photo agency in the world. Its outstanding collection of premium, royalty-free images grows every day, with photographs, illustrations, and vectors you won't find any where else. Sign up for a cost-effective subscription plan and download 25 images every day (that's 750 each month!) with no hidden costs.
StockXpert	To sell your photos, Illustrations and videos: Photographers receive 50% after each download they generate. You can view your earnings in real time at your account, and you can manage your images with a powerful, easy to use interface.	To buy your photos, Illustrations and videos: You can get stock images for as low as $1, and if you buy credit packages, you can save even more! StockXpert has hundreds of thousands of high quality images covering all kinds of topics in over 150 categories, and it adds 10,000 new images every week.
Fotolia	To sell your photos: Photographers receive up to 80% of the image sales price (average 52%).	To buy photos: Choose from more than 2 million images from photographers from over 100 countries! Unbeatable prices, FREE and low priced photos starting at just $1.
iStockPhoto	To sell your photos, Illustrations and videos: Sell your photos, illustrations and video files. Get a comission every time your artwork is bought (20%-40%).	To buy photos, Illustrations and videos: This massive collection of royalty-free images is the world's fastest growing independent library. iStockPhoto features Photographs, vector Illustrations, Flash files, and Video clips. Buy images for as low as 1$ per image.
123rf	To sell your photos: Sell your photos and get 50% of the price from each photo downloaded.	To buy photos: From as low as $1 per image, 123RF now offers the lowest rates in town. Affordable subscription plans allow to download up to 20 images daily at just one fixed price.
BigStockPhoto	To sell your photos: Upload a few hundred popular photos and you could find you have a nice recurring monthly income on your hands. Make 50 cents to $1.00 for regular downloads and up to $60.00 each for Special Licensing downloads!	To buy photos: Huge collection of low cost royalty free stock photos. Photos cost from $1.00 each to $2.50 each depending on how many you purchase.