Online Photography Sales: Do It Yourself!
© Paul Mozell 2010
Selling your own photographic prints and licensing your work is now a do-it-yourself imperative! The photography marketplace is overflowing with online providers of print production services and increasingly, options for posting and selling licensed images on your own, without the help of a stock agency.
When the bottom fell out of the stock photography market about four years ago, largely due to the success of micro-payment or micro-stock agencies, a number of entrepreneurial small players stepped up and said to photographers, “we’ll give you the tools to sell your own work. Go for it!” You can waste your time uploading hundreds of thousands of images to iStock, Shutterstock, et al who will sell your work for peanuts, or you can stick to the rights managed model and try to get a decent paycheck worthy of your creative and technical skills. Right’s managed, by the way, means clients pay a negotiated fee for very specific, usually one-time, use of each image. In the royalty free model, they pay a one-time fee for unlimited usage — but with no exclusivity.
To get you started, here is some essential info about a few of the sites. I joined Photoshelter very recently, and quickly found it to be one of the most comprehensive and sophisticated sites in the business. With a focus on sales of stock photography and professional images, this one site provides a wealth of educational tools for photographers about marketing their work; a means to archive many gigabytes of precious photographic images; an elegant and straightforward system for making websites and online galleries, and no less than 3 different commercial photolab services integrated with the site. They’ve partnered with Fotoquote from Cradoc Software to give your customers the ability to pay for usage based on current market rates and data. Very cool. And there’s more – I just don’t have the space. This is no Flickr and its no Kodak Gallery. Its a place for full-time and part-time pros who need to post password-protected images for clients, make galleries for brides, galleries for sales of fine art prints, and host events done by sports and event photographers.
I’ve been with Printroom for a few years as well. To me, their focus is on event photography and secondly on the wedding and portrait market. Printroom has a great offline uploading tool that works very cleanly, their pricing is very low, print quality good, and you can post output from weddings, portrait sessions, and sports events with ease. I’ve shot road races in the morning and posted the shots that afternoon, with searchable bib number IDs built into the search fields. Very fast. I like their templates for suggested pricing and the tables where you can instantly see your profit margin from each print production product.
Collages.net is the place to go for a get a very elegant sites for your weddings and portrait shoots. Select the music, the appropriate design template and upload your work. I especially like the way you can pre-post, or bookmark a wedding. Although you only start paying for the service on the day you upload images, you can get a designed URL, so that brides, friends, and relatives can log-in and request instant notification when their online proofs are ready. Collages does a lot of marketing on your behalf, sending low-key messages out to registered guests when the standard 2 month posting time is about to elapse. You, the bride, or a guest, can pay to extend the posting period for a modest fee. You can pay by the job, by the month, or get a break by paying in volume up front. Their interface is better than anything offered by the big wedding labs. Amaze your clients with the lightning fast turnaround you can provide with a service like Collages. They do print fulfillment and digital offset books too.
Smugmug has a funky name – and they explain it somewhere on the site – but forget about that. This is the site to use if you want tons of flexibility for the look and feel of your photo gallery. You can sign up with just a vanity site that posts your photos for a modest fee, or get a professional level site for a little more, that has different pricing models and more features. The people who use Smugmug love it. I’m not a subscriber, but I keep running into devoted customers. Slick and well-engineered.
Other sites in the same league:
Livebooks – on a par with Photoshelter, catering to all kinds of imaging and design professionals. Also, Pictage – same users as Collages.
Don’t yell at me if I’ve missed your favorites here. Post a comment!
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