By licensing images and videos through stock agencies, photographers and filmmakers can make money by selling their work to people and businesses who need it for use in websites, advertisements, and other projects. Photographers and filmmakers can license their work in various ways, including rights-managed licenses, royalty-free licenses, pay-per-use licenses, or subscription licenses.

The amount of money they make depends on the type of license they choose and the terms of the agreement with the stock agency. Additionally, many stock agencies also offer marketing services to help photographers and filmmakers promote their work to potential buyers.

What type of imagery sells on stock websites?

The types of imagery that sell the best on stock websites vary depending on the type of stock agency, the current trends, and the needs of buyers.

Generally speaking, images and videos with a clean, modern aesthetic tend to be the most popular. This includes images of people, landscapes, and objects that are free of distractions and have a simple background. Additionally, stock agencies that specialize in certain topics (such as travel or fashion) often look for images and videos that are related to those topics.

Most importantly the imagery needs to have commercial value to the buyer in conveying a message for editorial or advertising usage.

How much can you earn per image with stock image agencies?

The amount you can earn per image with stock image agencies varies greatly depending on the agency, the type of license sold, and the demand for the image. Most stock agencies pay photographers a percentage of each sale, so it is difficult to give an exact figure for how much you can earn. However, some stock agencies report that photographers can make anywhere from $0.25 to $100 or more per image licensed.

Selling stock imagery is more of a volume play and performance is often calculated as Revenue Per Image (RPI). I will share what kind of performance I have seen with various agencies further on in this piece.

How to get started selling stock images and videos?

Getting started selling stock images and videos is a relatively straightforward process. The first step is to create an account with a stock image agency. After registering, you can upload your photos and videos to the agency’s platform. Once your images are approved, they will be available for buyers to purchase a license to use them.

It is important to ensure that the images and videos you submit are of high quality and meet the requirements of the agency. Additionally, it is important that you provide accurate information about your work so buyers can make informed decisions about licensing your images.

Once your content is live on the platform, it will be up to you to promote and market it in order to generate sales. This can include creating social media posts, email campaigns, and other marketing efforts in order to increase the visibility of your content.

What agencies should you license through?

There are a lot of options out there for stock and microstock agencies to license work through and this list is by no means exhaustive. A good strategy would be to your best collections to premium agencies if you can get accepted into their collections and only submit those that wouldn’t make the cut to standard microstock agencies. You will get a feel for what each agency is looking for in content.

Premium stock agencies

The premium agencies offer clients carefully curated libraries of top-quality imagery and typically require exclusivity on the part of the creator for the assets submitted to their portfolios. Most of these agencies also require creators to apply to be included in the collection before being able to submit work for consideration.

Stocksy refers to itself as an “art-forward” royalty-free stock photo and video agency and this is reflected in its library. Stocksy is organized as a cooperative and pays contributors a 50%-75% share of revenue on license sales. There is a competitive application process to become a member.

Offset is a premium stock library of photos and illustrations curated by Shutterstock. While the brand behind this collection is known for cheap subscriptions; Offset is the opposite of Shutterstock. Offset only accepts top-quality content from vetted creators. They currently accepting applications for new artists.

Westend61 is a German-based stock photo agency with a focus on business, industry, people, health, and science.

Getty Images is probably the most well-known name on the list and is the leader when it comes to editorial images used by major media outlets. The Getty Images collection also includes creative images, music, and videos for commercial use. Getty tends to be a little more technology, industry, and current event focused whereas the other premium agencies are more art focused. Applicants are asked to submit a sample of work (3-6 pieces) for consideration.

Cavan is a newcomer to the stock agency space and markets imagery through premium collections at Adobe, Offset, Getty, Dissolve, Pond5, Nimia, Plainpicture, Amana, Gaopin, Imagine China, and Alamy in addition to their own library. I have a feeling Cavan really falls somewhere between the typical premium and microstock models.

Microstock agencies

Microstock agencies allow photographers and videographers to license their work to buyers in exchange for royalties. These agencies typically offer a wide range of images and videos at low prices, making them an attractive option for buyers who need a large number of stock images or videos but don’t have the budget to purchase them all from traditional stock agencies. These agencies typically do not require content exclusivity, but royalties especially from subscription customers are often very small around $0.15-$1.00 per download.

Since microstock agencies typically don’t require image exclusivity I submit the same photographs to all of these agencies and am listing them out in order of lifetime revenue. Each agency has its own acceptance criteria and as such what is accepted and available on each platform varies.

Adobe Stock is the stock licensing agency owned by Adobe and offers a massive advantage to creators selling imagery by including market access within their Creative Cloud suite of products. Easy access to templates, video clips, and imagery for creators using Photoshop, Premier Pro, After Effects, etc equals incredible exposure for your portfolio.

My Experience

• My biggest earning stock platform by a significant margin

• Does not accept editorial use only content

• Average Revenue Per Download (RDP) - $0.82

• Annual Revenue Per Image (RPI) - $0.33

iStock is the microstock agency owned by Getty Images offering a library of over 30 million royalty-free photos, illustrations, videos, and music. iStock's library is updated on a regular basis and is curated by its team of experts. Customers can also customize their content with iStock's advanced editing tools.

My Experience

• Average Revenue Per Download (RDP) - $0.60

• Annual Revenue Per Image (RPI) - $1.04

Eyeem is an app-based stock platform that is a cross between Instagram and Shutterstock with a library of over 20 million royalty-free images, illustrations, and videos. Eyeem syndicates content out to several overstock platforms including Getty Images and is a backdoor into the Getty Images catalog Getty Images does not accept all submissions from Eyeem and any sales will include splits for both Getty Images and Eyeem before you receive your royalties. Although the Revenue Per Download rate has declined since their launch it is still among my best-performing platforms.

My Experience

• Average Revenue Per Download (RDP) - $2.77

• Annual Revenue Per Image (RPI) - $3.82

Shutterstock is a global stock image agency offering a library of over 200 million royalty-free images, vectors, illustrations, videos, templates, and music tracks to customers in more than 150 countries. They provide customers with an array of tools to help them find the right content quickly and easily. In addition to standard commercial submissions, Shutterstock also accepts content for editorial use only.

My Experience

• Average Revenue Per Download (RDP) - $0.45

• Annual Revenue Per Image (RPI) - $0.29

Alamy is a global stock image agency offering more than 320 million high-quality photos, 360° panoramic images, vectors, and videos catering mainly to the European market. Alamy is a little different than the other microstock agencies in that they sell licensing on both Royalty Free and Rights Managed terms.

My Experience

• Average Revenue Per Download (RDP) - $7.01

• Annual Revenue Per Image (RPI) - $1.29

Pond5 is a creative marketplace offering an ever-expanding library of over 12 million royalty-free video footage, SFX, music tracks, After Effects templates, images, illustrations, and 3D models. Pond5 is focused more on video and related content compared to the other microstock agencies. Although the other platforms have added video if they didn’t always offer it most of my video sales have been with Pond5 which accounts for the higher RPD and RPI that I have experienced.

My Experience

• Creators can elect to license footage exclusively through Pond5 for an increased 60% revenue split and full pricing control.

• Average Revenue Per Download (RDP) - $17.95

• Annual Revenue Per Image (RPI) - $2.62

Dreamstime is a stock image library offering over 150 million royalty-free images, illustrations, videos, and audio. Dreamstime does also accept editorial imagery submissions but I have considered dropping them as the download volume just hasn’t been there to justify the extra effort.

My Experience

• Average Revenue Per Download (RDP) - $0.86

• Annual Revenue Per Image (RPI) - $0.20

123RF is a stock image library offering over 50 million royalty-free images, vectors, illustrations, videos, and music tracks

My Experience

• Average Revenue Per Download (RDP) - $0.48

• Annual Revenue Per Image (RPI) - $ 0.20

Depositphoto is a stock image library offering over 50 million royalty-free images, vectors, illustrations, videos, and music tracks. I haven’t had great luck with DepositPhoto and have questioned continuing to upload there at all. While my process is pretty streamlined to upload across all microstock agencies it still takes a little extra time.

My Experience

• Average Revenue Per Download (RDP) - $0.33

• Annual Revenue Per Image (RPI) - $0.10

Build an efficient workflow to capture, edit, keyword, and submit imagery

Building an efficient workflow to plan, capture, edit, keyword, and submit images is important for maximizing your return on time invested and to help keep you on a regular schedule of submissions. Set a goal for the frequency and size of projects to shoot and submit. Regular additions to your collections both keep your library growing. Whether it is a part of an algorithm or just driven by human behavior I have noticed a definite trend of new submissions helping to lift license sales of previously submitted photos that have been in the library for years.

Plan

Start planning what to shoot by cross-referencing the content you are interested in with your agency’s needs. Most of the stock agencies will put out a resource page highlighting in-demand imagery based on internal research of clients’ search trends to help you. Since this is based on current trends you will often find seasonality in some common themes around holidays, seasons, etc. Trending topics are another way to find themes that may be in demand right now, but also remember that you are building a library that will hopefully continue to sell and generate revenue for years to come.

Once you identify the topic plan for how you create the images, the goal here will be to shoot a whole set of images around that theme to cover how a potential buyer wants it depicted. I usually shoot around 10 or more images in a set and will think about various video clips I can shoot at the same time.

Capture

When you do your shoot take time to consider how a buyer may use the image and capture them to be conducive to a variety of use cases.

• Leave “white space” in some images for advertising text

• Consider include high key and low-key images to match a potential client’s style

• Think about the orientation of the image and capture both landscape and portrait orientations

• Have you captured images conducive to a square crop for social media use?

• Have you captured photos drawing the viewer’s attention to both the left and right sides? This could be relevant to a client’s particular layout.

• Consider what emotions or messages the potential clients may be trying to tell and capture all of them.

• For video; is there potential for a timelapse?

• How might you be able to create b-roll footage of the subject?

  • Think of the basic shots you could shoot; panning, zooming, tilting, dolly, etc.

While you will edit the shots think about getting everything right that you can in camera. Editing a whole set of images especially if you are needing to airbrush out logos takes a lot of time. Along the same lines; keep your workspace clean so that you aren’t spending hours later at full zoom obliterating dust. Anything you can do in the capture phase to reduce editing time is worth it.

Edit

With editing, you can either go with very light editing to leave room for the buyer to make their own choices or go with your own style and edit to your own aesthetic. You can get an idea of what sells well by looking through the agency’s top-selling content. Some agencies will also give you the option to upload both edited and raw files for some media types. This is probably of particular interest for video files where the buyer may want to color grade the footage along with their overall project.

Keywording

Choosing the right keywords to add to each image's metadata is of monumental importance in helping your images be discovered by potential buyers. While most agencies include the ability to keyword in the platform it is far quicker to add keywords to metadata in a desktop application. I do this in Adobe Lightroom before exporting. This also makes sure I am properly keywording all of the files in my own database so that I can find them later on if I need them for another agency or project.

• Start with a very descriptive title consisting of less than 70 characters

• Include both broad and specific keywords to describe the main subject

• Include keywords for all of the objects in the image

• Include keywords for mood characteristics

• Include keywords for the major colors in the image

• Include keywords that describe the angle of framing of the subject

• Include keywords about how the image may be used commercially and by what industries.

Keywording can make all the difference in your work being found in an agency’s library so take your time with this. I like to start with keywords that describe the entire set, copy them across the whole group, and then go back to add image-specific keywords.

Submit

All stock agencies have a submission and approval process where images are reviewed for technical, legal, and commercial suitability. If you are submitting a set to a premium agency that requires exclusivity it is probably not too much trouble to upload through their online portal. They may not even have another option. For microstock agencies, I like to batch-upload sets of images to all of them at once via and FTP client like FileZIlla. Then all I have to do is log in to each platform to finalize the submissions.

Any images with trademarked material, logos, or identifiable people will need model releases for commercial use uploaded along with them.

Track and measure results

While not necessary there are a number of applications available that connect via API or scrape from the agency portals to aggregate performance across portfolios with multiple agencies. Typically these platforms allow you to group photos in collections and track image performance across multiple platforms. This can be useful to inform you on what is working so you can focus on producing more content that sells.

Microstockr is the platform that I currently use to track performance across portfolios with a subscription at their Professional tier. Microstockr is a desktop application available for both Windows and Mac OS that connects to all of the agencies I use and provides clean dashboard to view and compare performance. It is simple, affordable, and does what I need.

Stockperformer offers a similar platform that I used for a number of years. Stockperformer provides more granularity for tracking performance based on productions, keywords, themes, and sale types (subscription vs individual sale). I had no issues with this platform it was just more expensive than the professional tier on Microstockr.

Enjoy the revenue stream and build on the success

Congratulations! You have started building a library of assets that will continue generating revenue for years to come. There is a snowball effect when it comes to selling stock imagery. Keep shooting and submitting and you will see your recurring revenue grow over time.

This whole process can fit well within other photography businesses as an additional revenue stream. As an alternative to dedicated stock shoots you can work shots into your normal commercial, portrait, food, or product shoots that will be well suited for addition to your stock portfolio.

Happy shooting! and good luck!

Some of the links on this page lead to affiliate or referral links that earn me a small commission if you use their service. In the case of stock agencies, this is typically a bonus for any sales that you make through their platform.