A little eye candy.
Shutterstock.com is one of the largest stock photo agencies. For the past 6-8 months, I have been trying to get my account approved by uploading 10 images and having at least 7 of them accepted. What annoyed me most was that after submitting 10 images, if they were rejected, you have to wait 30 days to try again. Also, sometimes I would submit the same photos that were approved last round, but because 7 out of 10 were not approved, the whole batch was rejected. Depending on who reviews the photos, some might accept the photo, while some might reject it.
Finally after getting approved, I uploaded my portfolio of around 800+ images. I currently have 100 waiting to be submitted, and 53 approved. Within the first few days of having images in my portfolio, I started seeing sales. This was good, since I have submitted to other sites and have never had a sale in years. However, the low commission rate is a downside. This month I have had 3 sales, and have only made $0.75. Since the minimum amount they allow a payout is $75, I would say I have a ways to go.
Shutterstock is definately more active than other sites, but one thing I found did turn me off a little bit:
I uploaded images which are generally around 1944×2592 pixels, however they are selling a size that is larger: 3888×5184. I do not understand why they would upsample the image. Even the best upsampling algorithms degrade the quality. However, the price is the same for the large size or the original size, so I guess it doesn’t really hurt anyone.
What does hurt buyers is the fact that they sell images in TIFF format. Unless you convert to TIFF from RAW, there really isn’t a reason to use it. I upload images in JPEG format, and they sell them in a TIFF format as well. This means that the quality loss from the JPEG format will be translated into TIFF, so the benefits of TIFF (lossless quality) is effectively neutralized. I can’t come up with an explanation for why they would do this. (However, they do not that the TIFF’s are converted from JPEG right on the page, probably to control any buyer remorse issues they may have.)
Overall, I would recommend submitting to Shutterstock. I have had several sales after having images in my Portfolio for only a few days. While it is hard to get approved, if you take good photos, you can grow your portfolio easily.
Click here to see my Shutterstock Portfolio (and buy some photos!)
UPDATE:
July 2010 was a pretty good month for me on Shutterstock (comparatively). I had 16 sales totaling $4.00 in commission (not great I know, but at least I had some sales!)
I now have 135 approved photos on Shutterstock. The best month I ever had was April 2010, during which I had 9 sales totaling $30.00. The bulk of that commission came from an “Enhanced Download” which is basically an extended license.
The commission on that sale was a whopping $28.00, which made me wonder how much the person paid for it (it ends up working out that an Enhanced Download costs about $100 for a TIFF file that was converted from a JPEG, but carries an Extended License for merchandising.)
I have not yet considered using one of these services, mainly for me it is the approval fiasco that turns me off, while it is obviously to keep the quality up it seems simply based on a whim just like ezine articles, apparently I am not the original author of the own work I created with a technique that is fully my own and has never been found before lol
Is there any possibility of using png?
I find that it is of far superior quality than jpeg
I think some sites do allow png, some do not.
i have a portfolio around 950 pic, i will publish it will comes 1000. thanks for the post
I’ve been reading your site for over an hour now! I really enjoy it, so keep up the good work!
Marissa
After reading everything you went through, You still want to use the guys? I will visit the site and see what’s up… I would have to question .75 cents after three sales. It seems to me you may make more selling to doctors or business locations, just a thought.
Yeah it isn’t a lot of money, but what’s done is done, so I am gonna leave the images up there and they will keep making me a little money over time.
Thank you for this nice review. I didnt know about shutterstock, but it looks worth making account, and try.
Thanks for the informative article. I had never consider Shuttershock before.
Submitting photos on Shutterfly really takes a long process, but I bet once you get approved it’s worth the waiting. I like how strict they are on checking the images submitted to them. They are more after the quality for the images submitted. So once you got accepted you must really be very proud.
I’d be interested to hear more about your experience with Shutterstock in a few months after you get more images approved.
Congrats on getting approved!
Shutterstock sounds like a good place to earn residual income. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but having your portfolio earn you money with little work (after getting approved) then why not try? I never thought of using such a service, so thank you!
Yeah, so far this month I have had 9 sales, totaling $2.25. So the sales are pretty consistent, and I only have 56 items in my portfolio, if I had more I am sure the sales volume would increase.
Most annoys me to wait. I am very impatient !
Photography is my hobby and I think it’s good that there is a place where you can promote your work!
I think shutterstock is not so good as Fotolia.. at least from a photographers point of view…
Yeah, I have photos on Fotolia as well, however they seem about the same as far as pickyness goes. They have only approved 53 of my images, and only 3 have sold. I have been submitting to them for more than a year.
I had to come back and read more of the comments. When all is said and done, some money is always better than no money. Just keep building the portfolio. I would also keep track of the ones that sell, see if there’s a trend or something. You know , like snow scenes around Christmas.
Yeah, I agree. If I start getting better, they might accept more images, and in turn I could make more money.
Great review! I will try it. I am also into photography and this might be a good move for my career. I viewed your portfolio and they were really great. I bet you’ve been earning a lot of money from it. Thanks a lot.
Well, last month I reported halfway through the month that I had 9 sales totaling $2.25, but for the rest of the month I only got 1 sale. So my total for March was 10 sales and $2.50, no so great. I haven’t seen a sale yet in April. I guess maybe my portfolio just isn’t large enough.
Well, today I logged in to find that a few days ago I had 1 sale for $0.25, but today I had a file that was purchased using the “Enhanced Download” license, basically an extended license, and I made a profit of $28.00 from that 1 image, so Shutterstock has suddenly leaped ahead in my mind as far as the best stock agency goes.
Here is the image that sold (and it also happens to be one of my best sellers:
http://www.shutterstock.com/pic.mhtml?id=46940332
I’m going to try this photo agencies for better pictures.
I have recently been thinking about stock photos, and found your review very helpful. Thank you.
I have my Fotolia, I will just ask if this Shutterstock is better or there is some difference between the two.
I have made more money with Shutterstock. I have only had 2 or 3 sales with Fotolia, but with Shutterstock, it is harder to get approved, but when you do you have more sales per month.
I’ve used shutterstock to purchase vectors and images in some design projects. I didn’t know that they created TIFF’s from the JPG’s, that sounds a bit odd to me.
A lot of professional photographers are registered with Alamy.
I have never seen Alamy before, I am uploading my images now, will let you know what I think about it.
interested to hear more about your experience with Shutterstock in a few months after you get more images approved. detectives in delhi
i heard the competition on shutterstock is pretty rough. i want to hear more about your earning in a few months
have you considered mounting your best photos to bamboo, acrylic or aluminum? we can do that and offer big discounts to artists and photographers. If you need to display your work in a unique way let us know and we can work with you to provide the best medium for you work
Hey, nice site! Thank you for posting. I’ll come back.
stock photos can be hit and miss sometimes you just got to keep plugging away
After reading everything you went through, You still want to use the guys? I will visit the site and see what’s up… I would have to question .75 cents after three sales. It seems to me you may make more selling to doctors or business locations, just a thought.
Since I wrote the review I have been making a few sales a month, and it has now added up to about $50. The better the images I add, the better my sales get, so I am sticking with it.
hI Jamie, I recently saw your pics and I would recommend some color adjustment to sell them better and help each one stand out more, I think it would make a difference.
I have tried a bit of color adjustment, but I am just not too sure how to do it the right way, without the images being rejected for doing it too much. Do you have any pointers?
is there anyone out there making a decent income from these stock sites? Do you think it has been worth your while with the time spent uploading etc vs income?
I don’t know about making enough money to live off of, but I do know that quite a few people make hundreds or thousands of dollars a month from their photos. As far as time spent, as of now I have not been paid any royalties from any of the sites I contribute, I have not earned enough for a payout, but you upload an image once, then it is there to earn money forever, so a few minutes spent uploading it could potentially earn you a lot of money over a length of time.
Upload 4000 quality images, get approved with 2000 and you will get $20,000 or more per year from shutterstock. One rule – quality nice looking – high commercial value graphics
Shutterstock is the bottom of the barrel. It’s the most arrogant stock site out there, which would be expected if it wasn’t also the worst stock site out there. I conducted an experiment after reading some negative comments about SS to see if it was worth my time to sign up: I uploaded 10 images. 4 were rejected for very vague reasons (they claim to make these reasons clear so that newcomers can learn from their mistakes, but no such luck). In addition, they make submitters wait an entire month before they can submit another 10 photos. This makes absolutely no sense and totally justifies all the negative things I’ve read about the site. So a month later, I submitted the exact same 10 photos. This time, 5 were rejected and 3 of the accepted ones had been rejected the first time! This proves that they have no set standards and whether you get accepted or not depends entirely on which reviewer you get and his/her mood on that day. Also, I have thousands of photos that I gave file names to for submission to other sites, and when I finally got accepted at ShutterStock and attempted my first batch upload, it failed due to a “critical upload error”. I looked for the problem in the forum and discovered that there can’t be any spaces in the file name or the transfer will fail. So I would have to rename thousands of files to upload them. All this trouble and you only make $0.25-$0.30 per photo. I posted my own comment in the forum about how ridiculous this was and that comment was deleted within ten minutes. This level of arrogance is unheard of and it’s no wonder they’re steadily dropping in the rankings each month. Trust me, folks, don’t waste your time