SPECIAL FEATURE
Stock Photography Website Review

You can use your wordserver™ 2.0 web site to produce a quality presentation for all your digital images. To sell your graphics online you may consider an eBay shop. Alternatively, you may consider joining one or more of the many stock photography resource websites.

By submitting your photography to stock photography web sites, you will get the right kind of exposure for your work. And as with the eBay model, you can link your wordserver 2.0 website images directly to those that are offered for sale on stock photography websites and let your agency deal with the transactions on your behalf. However, the percentage of the sale price that ends up with you will be an important factor.

Here we look at three popular stock photography websites, outline how they work and most importantly, tell you what they'll pay you for your photographs and digital images!

iStockphoto
website: www.istockphoto.com
number of images: 367,000
cost to buy images: $1 - $3
contributor's earnings: $0.20 - $0.60

Founded in 2000, iStockphoto is one of the most popular royalty-free stock photography web sites on the Internet. They claim to receive 3 million visitors a month from a user base of 350,000. They use a simple credits system for trading images. Buyers pay $1 for each credit and use 1-3 credits for each purchase depending on the resolution of the graphic chosen.

Contributing artists simply sign up for an account and can upload their content via an administration system. You can use income generated to convert to credits or receive a payment once you reach $100.

Verdict: Good exposure for your work, easy to use and accessible, but unlikely to make you rich.

Alarmy
website: http://www.alamy.com/contributors/
number of images: 3 million
cost to buy images: from around £50
contributor's earnings: 65% or 75%

UK based Alarmy was founded in 2001 and claims to have 140,000 image buying customers world wide. The company sources it's images from stock agencies with 4600 photographers. To become one of them you are required to complete a comprehensive registration system and send a sample CD/DVD. The quality control process for this and subsequent commissions takes up to 2 weeks.

The trade off for this waiting game may be worthwhile however. A quick search for images of 'dogs' suggests prices start at around £50 for a 1 Mb 480 x 747 example and reach around £300 for the high-res 3558 x 5530 versions. They offer either 65% earnings without storage fees or 75% with the charge. You can select your licence type for each photograph too, by selecting royalty free or rights protected options.

Verdict: The realistic percentage paid for sales coupled with the typical charges could mean that good high quality photographs will make you some cash. However, with millions of photos to compete with you will need to choose your descriptive keywords carefully.

LiquidLibrary
website: www.liquidlibrary.com/submissions.asp
number of images: 90,000
cost to buy images: $25-$100
contributor's earnings: Unknown

LiquidLibrary is part of Dynamic Graphics, Inc, owners of a number of quality stock photography brands such as Corbis and Creatas. LiquidLibrary invites submissions of around 50 images from photographers via post to a US address for approval. They will also consider illustration and multimedia productions. Like Alarmy, the review process takes 2 weeks.

There is no information about fees paid, but when searching for 'dogs' once more, images are of a high quality and were consistently priced at $25 for low-res rising to $100 for high-res versions (all royalty-free).

Verdict: It may be difficult to get a foot in the door, but good quality photography will get handy exposure from the group.

Website design 0003-R


Link gallery photographs
to your stock photography
website submissions

 iStockphoto: stack 'em high and sell 'em cheap

Alarmy: a large customer
base and even bigger database. Good potential
for popular subjects.

LiquidLibrary: part of a quality
group of image suppliers offering high quality
photography and multimedia.