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In a previous post I looked at making your photos available to others as prints or photo gifts. Another option is to upload your images to one of the digital stock libraries, where they can be purchased, typically by designers, for use in other people's publications. It gives you quite a buzz to receive a couple of books through the post from a publisher, containing some of your work. Yes, you could set up a PayPal account and open your own online store as I initially did, but the reality of the situation is that your images on a personal site aren't going to get anything like the exposure they might get on a purpose-built and established one. So where do you start?

What is "stock photography"?

A definition is always a good place to start. Here's one from Wikipedia:

Stock photography is photography or other imagery of common landmarks, concepts, and events that can be used and reused for commercial design purposes. Book publishers, specialty publishers, magazines, advertising agencies, film makers, web designers, graphic artists, interior decor firms, corporate creative groups, and other entities utilize stock photography to fulfill the needs of their creative assignments. By using stock photography instead of hiring a photographer to perform on location shooting, customers can save valuable time and stay on budget. With a wealth of images, stock photography databases that may be searched online save photo researchers valuable time when they are looking for just the right image. With today's digital delivery methods, images may be purchased online and delivered via FTP or email, the very same day.

Stock photography is sometimes called a photo archive, or just stock photos. The term photo archive often refers to the website or physical location where the photographs are stored. Photo archives are also sometimes called image banks. As modern stock photography distributors often carry stills, video, and illustrations, none of the existing terminology provides a perfect match for the state of the industry.

Which photo archive should I contribute to?

This is a matter of personal choice. Do a Goggle search, have a look at the results, and see what you like. Does it fit with your vision? Does it seem "professional"? Is the royalty structure acceptable? Etc...

I chose to look at iStockPhoto, which describes itself as follows:

iStockphoto is the world?s fastest growing royalty-free stock photography community.

Supported by its inspiring collection and collaboration of photographers and designers from across the globe, iStockphoto works in conjunction with an industrious inspection team, ensuring quality, composition and legality. Each week this enables us to bring over 1,000 new photographs, digital images, vector illustrations and flash files to an already bulging library of 268,000 images.

iStockphoto was originally founded in 2000 as a solution to the perpetual designer?s need: access to high quality images without breaking the project budget. Working on a system of micro-payments, iStock images are available through a credit system that allows you to purchase images individually or in bulk discount for the starting rate of just $1.00 each.

iStockphoto's community driven approach helps make it a perfect breeding ground of growth, education and exposure for both new and veteran photographers and designers.

It's a feature-rich product with a well-made interface. It costs nothing to open an account. It costs nothing, other than your time, to contribute images (although you have to pass a test!) The trouble is... it pays almost nothing either.

What is "royalty-free"?

The term "royalty-free" is a bit ambiguous as you do pay a royalty; it isn't "free" as in money, nor can you use it without restriction. If you pay a fee (royalty) up-front to use an image (in permitted ways), you don't have to pay for the privilege again each time you re-use it.

The basic royalty structure on iStockphoto is 20%. This means that if a customer pays $US2.00 for your image, you'll get just $US0.40. This is much lower remuneration than images purchased from traditional stock sources—but it is also probably more realistic. Non-professional photographers otherwise aren't all that likely to get a look at the action and if you are good, well, you might sell thousands of images! One thousand sales at $US0.40 profit each is still 10 times more than just one sale at $US40.00. The detail of the iStockPhoto licence can be read here. You can convert your earnings to download credits, or cash them in if they exceed $US100.00.

How are my images displayed?

If you follow the rules your images will be displayed in your personal gallery, but may also be included in galleries put together by other people (e.g. a collection of images relating to shadows, the colour 'orange", etc.). They will also appear in site-wide search results if you have been careful enough in choosing your keywords. When signed in you have additional options for managing your images, as well as the usual member tools:

You can take a look at my personal gallery here, as an example, and maybe purchase an image or two ;-)

How do I upload my images?

You can either upload them one at a time using the web interface (see Upload Files on the left in the above graphic), or you can upload several at once (as a "batch"). The later is facilitated by the iPhoto plugin which can be downloaded from here, allowing you to export directly from iPhoto. There are a few less buttons to push than via the web interface, and any comments you've made in iPhoto are automatically transferred to the photo description field:

How stringent are they?

Fairly—and that's a good thing. I uploaded an initial selection of 40 of my images for review, all of which I thought were reasonable shots. I wanted to submit a variety in order to get a feel for what kinds of image iStockPhoto would approve, and what kinds they would not. Of the 40 images I uploaded 23 were accepted, the reasons for rejection being:

• (11) Photo shows unacceptable compression artifacts when viewed at 100%.
• (3) Photo shows an unacceptable level of noise when viewed at 100%.
• (1) This image is too much like several we already have, and we are not currently accepting any more fitting this description.
• (1) Poor lighting severely limits the usefulness of this image to designers, and as such, disqualifies it as a stock image.
• (1) The image includes copyrighted or trademarked content such as logos, artwork, paintings, photographs, or statues.
• (1) The pixels in your image are color distorted (sometimes due to low lighting). Sometimes a Despeckle filter will fix this.

What this means you can have the confidence that your photos are "up to standard"—reassurance you may not have if you set up your own store. Rejection is also educational. I know my camera creates noisy images, and I know I should shoot RAW but I don't have that option. So, via iStockPhoto, I can justify to my wife why I need a new digicam! I'm under no misconceptions, however, that royalties are going to pay for it...

Update 17.03.07: There's a useful series called Make money selling digital photos by Mike Panic, starting with Part 1 here. Also read Selling photos online by Anonymous.

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