Digital cameras are so cheap these days its almost a given that you have one or will be buying one soon. Why then, don’t you use that camera to make yourself a few extra dollars and sell the photos you take online? Stock photography sites are crying out for new images and will pay you every time one of their clients, who include website designers, magazine editors, publishers, bloggers, website owners etc. buys the image through their site. You can make a lot of money this way if you take it seriously, or just make extra money from your hobby part time as an amateur photographer. Either way, the list of stock photography sites where you can sell your images online provided at the end of this article will get you started…and who knows, maybe you’ll find a new career!

Where Can I Sell My Digital Photos Online?

There are a growing number of good online stock photography agencies who are looking for your original, good quality photographs to add to their online photo databases.

These micro stock photo sites work in your favour by taking out all the hard work you would otherwise have to put in to marketing your images. By allowing them to sell your photographs on line you can spend more time taking, prepping and basically building your portfolio of images for sale rather than messing around with time consuming and expensive website hosting, shopping carts, promotion, customer service and all those other littletime consuming activities which come with running your own business.

Of course, a micro stock photography agency doesn’t do all the hard work for you at no cost. Selling photos online through a micro stock photo site means you will be agreeing to give them a percentage of all the sales you make through them. This commision for selling photos varies from one stock image site to the next and will depend on a number of factors such as the size of the image, quality, type, whether it is single use or royalty free, exclusive to that site and so on.

Micro Stock Photography Sites You Can Sell Your Photos Through

The folowing places are some of the sites you can buy photos and find illustrations, cartoons, web graphics etc. for sale, or where you can list and sell your own graphics, images and photographic works to people worldwide. If you want to sell stock photos online you should definitely consider some of these sites as they are not only a great way to get the sales rolling in, but also to get your name out there, network with other online photo publishers and start building and displaying your portfolio.

Shutterstock – possibly the biggest stock photography site on the internet, Shutterstock pays you $0.25 for every image downloaded from the site by one of their members. Once you have sold over $500 worth of images, this rises to $0.30 per download. The really nice thing about Shutterstock, from a photographer’s standpoint, is that they have a large member base who pay a monthly subscription to the site in order to gain access to these photos. Each of these members can download up to 750 images per month as part of that subscription which means you have the opportunity to sell a lot of images! Just 2000 downloads is $500 a month, each and every month…that’s a pretty good residual income from just one stock site.

iStockPhoto – One of the most popular microstock photography sites, iStockPhoto not only allows you to sell photos for commision through their site but also gives you the option to sell video, audio, vector illustrations and flash graphics. Whilst you do have to jump through hoops to actually become a member, it is well worth the effort as this is a very active, busy and rewarding stock photography agency to belong to. Commision depends on a wide range of factors but is basically 20% of the sale for non-exclusive images and 40% for stock shown only on this website.

Big Stock Photo – Big Stock Photo pays from $0.50 to $3.00 per photo download under normal licencing conditions. For special licenses you may earn up to $60 per download which can’t be bad! BigStockPhoto also has another unique selling point for photographers in that they allow web designers to use those photos in the templates they build and resell them without paying exhorbitant fees over and over with each template sale. This is a great deal for them and means if you great photos they might want to use, then more sales for you.

Fotolia – This site offers more of an open door policy to photographers of all levels of talent without all the messing around you’ll see on some other sites. Here, you will earn commisions starting as low as 33% to as high as 64%, based upon your ranking within the system and whether or not the images are exclusive to Fotolia. It is very easy to rise up in your photographer ranking at Fotolia – just sell more photos. The more you sell, the higher your ranking and the more commision you will receive. This is a really friendly and nice site to belong to.

StockXpert – This site makes it simple for selling stock photos online. Here you will get a flat 50% of each sale which to the buyer is also a great price starting at just $1 for each downloaded image. Everyone is looking for affordable royalty free stock photo images which makes this a site with the potential to earn you some nice money.

There are others, which I will probably list in time as I myself become more familiar with them. Some of these sites have a real open door policy and welcome novice photographers, whilst others are more stringent in their requirements so be sure to read all the rules and instructions when you join if you want to ensure you are accepted onto the site. Once there, have fun and enjoy the money you will make!