The trials of selling stock photography
July 6th 2007Recently, my good friend and business partner Gareth asked me how the photography was going. In particular, he’d asked if I or Monica was selling any of it through the stock photography agencies. Neither I nor Monica had really explored it, instead focusing our attentions to limited series prints and working on our projects. He proposed I take a look at two services: iStockphoto.com and Fotolia.com.
My experience to date with iStockphoto has been so so. The signup process is pretty straight forward, the site pretty well designed. They make you take a little test to make sure you won’t be stealing someone’s work and that you understand models are supposed to have releases, the usual fair. I started to question the service when they asked for a photograph of some type of government identification, such as drivers license or passport. I wasn’t happy giving an article out to a company, so I made a very small, unreadable copy of my id (with some details blurred out) for this purpose. The software didn’t seem to care.
Just when I thought I had finished the process…I have to submit photographs with my “application.” Apparently they just don’t accept anyone. No problem, I uploaded three sports photographs. Then I here it takes nearly two weeks before you get an answer. Looking at their queue, they have 10706 images waiting for approval, the longest having been sitting for four days. I’m not expecting a reply any time soon.
I can’t say my experience with Fotolia has been any better. Their sign-up process is simpler, except that they wanted my social security number. You can imagine that I wasn’t going to give them this, having not even uploaded an image yet, let alone sold any image. I skipped this part. I then took another little test, and was ready to upload. Except, there was no upload button. As a matter of fact, their still isn’t an upload button. Apparently they’ve recently upgraded their software and the forums are a buzz with complaints as people are losing sales and can’t upload images.
Has any of this turned me off to the stock image photography game? Not really. I’ll wait for answers and fixes and then I’ll go from there. Maybe this gets better.
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