Without being able to see views & sales in real-time, getting a good idea of your image performance is essentially non-existent. Most importantly, you don’t get to see sales of your images except for ONCE PER MONTH. Instead, you have to open each batch individually and view only those images in that batch to see how they’re doing. But as a result, it’s impossible to see overall performance of all your work. The photos are also organized in batches, which actually makes a lot of sense for the upload portion so that you can combine similar images in a single submission. There is no visibility into image views other than a little square saying it’s getting “a lot” or “a little” in views. You’d think by now they should have many years of feedback from contributors to develop the best site out there (especially with all the money their making with the other 80% of your photo sales). They even just finished a complete overhaul of the site and it’s still something that might as well be from 2003.

Submission Platform & Content Management: Next, their submission platform for contributors is awful. So all your eggs are in their basket with those images. That means anything you sell on Getty cannot be sold anywhere else. DisadvantagesĮxclusivity: The biggest disadvantage with Getty is that the contract is exclusive. They are able to look past the technical and see the creative value in work.

Let’s say you have a photo that’s blurry but conveys a strong emotion or story, they don’t reject it over “subject not in focus”. If you have questions or concerns that you want them to consider when reviewing your work, you can write it in the notes section for the reviewer to read.Ĭreative Freedom: In my submissions to Getty I’ve noticed they are more artistically inclined than the other agencies. Submission Communication: Another nice feature is you have the ability to add notes to your submissions. Now the market for an editorial only image is smaller, but selling is better than not selling right? Editorial use only signified by the orange badge in the upper left-hand side. If getting a release is impractical and removing stuff from the photo would make it look terrible, you can simply classify it as Editorial Only and you can still sell it. This is important for people shooting things like travel or architecture. If your work gets in and even better, if it sells it’s a nice boost to your ego and can help motivate you to keep shooting.Įditorial: In addition to that, they offer Editorial classification of your images. Going into this with the right mindset is key to not getting discouraged.įeel Good Factor: Another advantage is, well, pride. These days there’s simply too much competition, and too much oversupply for most people to make a significant income from selling stock. Selling your work as stock might give you some nice supplemental income to help buy a lens or that tripod you always wanted, but most of the time it’s not going to pay the bills. One general thought on selling stock before we begin: No matter what agency you sell through, do not expect to become rich by selling stock photography.

After about 8 months of working with different agencies, I put together some thoughts on the major stock agencies and my experiences with each to help give others some guidance in the world of stock photography. However, now I had a new problem, which one do I go with? Each have their advantages and disadvantages and it can be hard to know where to list your images. With that, I finally decided to start selling my work through stock agencies. After doing some growing up, humility and logic began to play their role and I realized, “Well, I can let the work sit there on my website and do nothing, or I can let it sit there and earn me money… Hmm…”.

Sell photos to shutterstock