Selling your photos

Ways to make money from your photographic images

There are many different ways to get paid for your photos but most of them boil down to two different methods.

1. Selling (licensing) the image itself for use by others in their digital or print projects
2. Selling products with your image printed on them

There are plenty of services on the web that will allow you to do both for free and plenty of others will charge you. I have tried out a few of the free methods.

Cafepress provides merchanidising products that can be customised with your logo or image. This initially just involved printed clothing but they have since expanded to include calendars, cards, cups, stickers, posters and any number of other items suitable for printing images on.

They deal with all the payment processing, order details, printing and delivery. As a result they take most of the money but you get to set your own specific markup. They now pay worldwide via Paypal (which is more practical than the cheques they used to send out) and also have localised websites and distribution for non-American buyers.

Zazzle is more photography focused. They produce printed cards, calendars, posters, canvases etc. but they also do t-shirts, hats, bags, mugs and ornaments too. The benefit of Zazzle is that, unlike Cafepress, you have one online store containing all of your images/products rather than having a separate store for each image.

123RF Stock Photos provide licensed photos for use on the web or in print. Users can choose the resolution of the image they require and pay more for larger resolutions.

Unlike the printing services above there  is quality control here. Not all images are accepted and they have to be above a minimum resolution to be considered. This makes things a bit more of a challenge and means only your very best photos will be on show.