Search by keyword

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.

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.

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.

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.