Launch or Relaunch Your Career in Photography Using These Sites & Tools

Pexels is a website that allows you to offer your creative photography to the world for free, ensuring that your work is protected by a simple but effective agreement by users who download and intend to use your work. It's advised that you read all contracts pertaining to your work on your own so you understand just what you're getting involved in. But the contracts generally hold up that users who download the images may or may not credit your work (don't worry, a quick Google Images search will lead the images back to you in one way or another, if you set up your SEO properly), and that any user who downloads your work may not ever upload the work as their own work, redistribute the work as if they are the original author of the work, and they also may not sell your work on their own sites.

Pexels has over 31,500,000 viewers a month, giving you the chance to put your work in front of those same millions of people. Pexels' website has it's own leaderboard which allows you to track the most viewed contributors on the site, which you presumably may study for your own success in your stock photography on the website.

Just like Pexels, here's another opportunity to offer your stock photography of all types of genres to the public for free. Users who download your photography are allowed to use your work and you're protected by their basic but honest contract which tells users that they may or may not credit you, but they absolutely may not reupload and claim your work as their own. Users are also not allowed to sell your photos on their site.

Pixabay has 36,100,000+ visits per month. Like Pexels, Pixabay also keeps track of it's top performing contributors with a leaderboard, tracking both most-liked photos as well as most-downloaded. The goal of free stock photo sites such as these are views and download, and monitoring your likes is also an important metric to pay attention to.

Unsplash is in the top 3 of free stock photos, so it's earn it's mentioning in this article. It's a heavy-hitting competitor amongst Pexels and Pixabay. Unsplash also has a subscription model for paying customers, which usually (and does, in this case) means that your images are worth more when bought by users under this model.

Unsplash brings in a whopping 28,000,000 views a month. Marking their all-time contributor statistics, they have an overwhelming 6.5 billion downloads and 1.11 trillion views since inception. They're nearing the 120,000,000 downloads mark in the past 30 days or 46 downloads per second, and almost 14 billion views in the past 30 days or 5,036 views per second. These are impressive numbers of people to get your work in front of.

You want to use free stock photo websites as a strategy to get eyes on your work, and use your name to lead them back to your website or booking service where people can pay you for your photography skills.

Also, you'll want to acknowledge that Unsplash offers Unsplash+, a subscription based service that pays contributors per image every time it's downloaded. So that's a plus to using Unsplash.

Wirestock might be a lesser known site, but it's definitely worth considering. 

Wirestock allows you to sell all kinds of media, including AI created artwork for commercial use. Their payout is simple. You will earn 85% on all royalties across the site. Your earnings are displayed to you on your dashboard and once your balance exceeds $30, you can withdraw to a Payoneer or PayPal account.

With royalties like that, I wouldn't count them out! Definitely worth taking the time to look into and seeing if this brand aligns with your photography goals. If they do, I would put them on a list of stock photo services to consider contributing to in order to earn a living from one's work.

Freepik is a huge reserve of different types of media, so not only are creatives selling their photography work here, they're also selling graphic arts, PNGs, logos, and more. So your work will be in front of different professional agencies and businesses seeking high quality artwork and stock photography. Selling your work here could be lucrative especially if you work in several different mediums. They've got everything necessary to get any creative company aligned with their vision of success. 

Freepik uses a freemium model to gain customers, meaning they offer a sort of trial of a limited amount of free images with a basic contract, and charge full price after the user exceeds their trial amount of downloads.

Freepik pays out 50% of royalties on all paid content to it's contributors.

Ready to get a big brand behind you? If you're ready for it, this is a brand you'll want to consider. Shutterstock is known for high quality stock images, music, and videos. As always, bigger brands come at a price, so if you're already engaging a fanbase or customer base, it'll be easier to make money with a brand such as Shutterstock. Starting out, you will earn only 15% royalties on your images sold through Shutterstock. See the below image for how they work their payouts.

For other earnings and how they pay, you can find them on the same website, right alongside the photos earnings. Click and follow the link to find out more information and see if Shutterstock is suitable for your photography career.

With Adobe Stock, you can earn 33% royalties on photos, vectors, and illustration, a very hefty price to pay when dealing with a large commercial brand. If you're selling stock videos, you earn 2% more at 35% royalties. Similar

Getty Images requires a review of 3 to 6 of your best shots, and they ask that you use their website for references of the style and quality of photos their looking for. Once they confirm that you are the copyright owner of the original 3 to 6 photos you've submitted, they'll send you an email confirming you've been accepted, and offer you a non‑exclusive agreement to get you started.

Below is a provided screenshot of the royalties offered to iStock and Getty contributors, which are 15% for photo contributors, unless you're exclusive which they then payout between 25% and 45%.

Keep in mind, iStock and Getty Images are run and owned by the same parent company, so you may want to pick one or the other rather than sign up twice, or sign up for both. They carry over the same guidelines so expect the same results from Getty Images to iStock.

Below is a provided screenshot of iStock and Getty Images royalties which are 20% for Getty contributors.

Why not build your own website? These days, you can use a simple no-code website builder and implement all the necessary elements. What you'll need to keep in mind is contact information, portfolio, a download section, a contract, and possibly a website booking widget so people can book directly from your site with just a click. This avoids the hassle of signing up and building a following on other social sites, going through the process of becoming familiarized, and getting straight to the point. You can use AI like ChatGPT to help you draft up a contract with basic needs, proofread it, and place it on your site in PDF form. Or you can find some contract templates on the internet to help you with your photography business. Make your images downloadable and protected by watermarks so they only get the download after payment. This might take a bit more time than signing up on a website and using their free traffic, so maybe you'll want to combine the two methods to get some traction. It never hurts to take your brand seriously and invest in your own platform to sell from.