Finally, a bit of good news. Shutterstock is still in the doldrums (with earnings this month of $877), but most of the other sites showed some positive improvements so that I ended the month with at least $2375. I say at least, because I noticed that on the first day of September I had a $50 sale in iStock’s partner program, which means that my normal estimates for iStock sales are probably low. What was good in September – 123RF...
I’ve only had one sale since moving to the new design of my personal stock agency, and so I decided to change the license type (from a sort of restricted royalty free license competing with Shutterstock and the like) to a one time use license with an extended option (for resale products) and reduced the pricing significantly. I rewrote my license based on one that Robin (from Symbiostock) uses on his stock site, and changed the pricing so that the...
After an extended vacation in Spain and then in London, I am back at home with around 1600 images to process and sort for my stock library. I thought I would write a long blog post about how I approach that, what I look for in terms of a useful stock photo from travel images and also how I go about keywording them. I have only just finished importing them into Lightroom, so it will be a little while before...
After a great set of earnings in August (OK, perhaps that isn’t altogether true…), I decided the time was right to build a new computer for my photography. My current PC was bought refurbished in 2010 and although I added more memory, it was increasingly slow when I wanted to move between the panels in Lightroom and even loading an image for editing seemed to take a few seconds. Frustrating! I saw this article by a fellow photographer Nasim Mansurov...
August seems to have been the worst month for a long time for me. Shutterstock was a disaster – just $786 and that includes a $96 sale in the Single on demand area in the final week of the month. Without that, it would have been less that $700! Back in January and February, I was regularly hitting $1000+ – since April it has been downhill all the way. It just goes to show that diversification is important – if...
Success at last… Well, in a small way I guess. Just 3 weeks after I launched my new improved stock site based on the new Symbiostock plugin and theme, I had my first sale: Admittedly it was for the smallest size image and I only earned $2.00, but you can’t help but get excited at a 100% royalty sale! Hope there are more in my future!!
This is a specialized post and only of interest to people who have created their own stock agency site using the Symbiostock plugin and WordPress. I’ve written a couple of posts about how I transitioned from the legacy Symbiostock Theme to the new plugin here. Why Backup: You may have signed up for backup services from your web hosting company, but at the end of the day you will have put 100s of hours into uploading, describing and processing your...
As I mentioned earlier this week, I have been creating a new Symbiostock based personal stock agency for all my images. This was partly because the legacy theme is not being supported any longer and partly because I wanted to simplify my hosting arrangements. To illustrate the issue, someone bought a couple of images from my legacy site last night, I charged him, but the site didn’t send the email with links to the images. Not good… Anyway, I thought...
Talk about being a glutton for punishment… I put many, many hours into creating my own stock site at BackyardStockPhotos using the first Symbiostock wordpress theme written by Leo. We had lots of issues along the way, with Leo battling bravely through each one and constantly listening to the endless demands of the stock photographers and illustrators that were using the theme. As often happens with internet based forums, the whole thing degenerated into name calling and a very antagonistic...
Yes, you are confused! The more you read the normal forum posts, the more it all becomes muddled. If I had a dollar for each time someone said that an image didn’t have a release and so it must be rights managed, or that all RF images are for commercial use I would be a wealthy man… Lets start with licensing. Royalty Free (RF) and Rights Managed (RM) are simply different licensing approaches. RF is a one-time license payment that...
