How to make money with your photos

Photography can be rewarding..

I love taking photos.  Whenever I travel I carry a camera with me. Sometimes this is just my phone camera, sometimes I take my compact camera or my DSLR, other times I'll have all three.

You never can tell when a great photo opportunity might appear.

I used to always take simple family / holiday photos but now I'm on the lookout for images that see the world a little differently.

Photography is very rewarding, when you see your images printed or on screen and they turned out well it feels good.  I always thought it would be nice to make a little money from my hobby and started to look into an easy way to do this.  

Competitions:

There are a number of websites that run photographic competitions.  These often have camera equipment or other photo services as prizes so winning these can be useful as well as good fun. One I particularly like to participate in is photocrowd.com. They run regular contests and these are really easy to enter.  As a member you can rate other entries in the contests and also see the winning entries for future inspiration.  Your photographs are displayed on the site and people can buy prints of these if you wish to allow this.

Masai children by their mud hut

Another good site for competitions and photo news in general is ePHOTOzine.com.

Image Libraries:

I first found out about image libraries when I was introduced to Fotolibra.com.  This is a UK based photo library where people can buy or sell images.  It is free to set up a basic account and upload up to 12 images, plus unlimited historic images and streetscapes.  If you want to have up to 10GB of selling space you need to upgrade to pro-membership which costs £18 per quarter.

Draped Seated Woman, Henry Moore

After a number of months on Fotolibra I discovered Alamy.com, which is completely free to join as a contributor. Both Fotolibra and Alamy have strict guidelines on the quality of the images they will sell so you will need to read their guides on preparing images for upload.  If an image isn't good enough it will be rejected.  

Taking the Bets, Chester Races

Of these two sites, I have had more success with Alamy and have sold images to newspapers, magazines, book publishers and holiday companies.

A bit of both:

Recently I discovered EyeEm.com which combines the fun of contests with the ability to sell images. It can sell directly and also has partnerships with Alamy, Getty Images and Adobe Stock for greater reach. Photos selected for the partnerships go into the Premium Collection.

I now have images for sale with Getty through my EyeEm account.  It was a real thrill when I first saw my images for sale with Getty and the first time one sold was amazing.

EyeEm are not strict with the image quality you can upload, however your photos will not make it into the Premium Collection if they are not of a good enough quality.

Here are some links to the sites mentioned.

Alamy
https://www.alamy.com/

EyeEm
https://www.eyeem.com/

Fotolibra
http://www.fotolibra.com/

Getty Images
http://www.gettyimages.co.uk/

Adobe Stock
https://stock.adobe.com/uk/

Photocrowd
https://www.photocrowd.com/

ePHOTOzine
https://www.ephotozine.com/

It would be great to hear if you have joined any of these and whether you have had any successes. Let me know in the comment box below.