4 replies to this topic

[bella]

I was recently asked by two seperate companies to provide them with images for their stock library. The terms seem to be decent. I can use the images for anything I want, and get I get paid if they get used by their clients. Ive been wondering though what financial compensation is normal in this business. Is anyone here providing images to stock libraties, and if so, how are you compensated?

[Aquatic]

Generally it's a 50/50 split between the Agency/Photographer. As for payment, that depends on the agency. Some pay monthly and others pay quarterly on your images that sell.



Dan

[MikeVeitch]

yep, i agree with Dan

[TimG]

Yep, I have the same experience. Payouts can take quite a time - as can anyone actually buying the images that you provide. But the agency that takes my stuff keeps telling me that it takes time to establish a stream of sales; and that it is important to keep providing images and build up a large, high-quality collection.

[Paul Kay]

The whole image market is changing. As someone who runs an image library (we are currently setting up a fully web searchable site) let me offer the following comments.

50/50 has been the norm but will depend on the library.

Don't expect to make a fortune - there are a great many pictures out there.

Understand your subject matter thoroughly - I am baffled at seeing many beautiful images which bear wrong IDs (yes including those posted by libraries on the web), poor information captions and vague locations - all are becoming more essential for sales. If you are fundamentally interested in your subject matter, this helps a great deal.

Consider carefully whether it is viable for you to sell images - there are often legal restrictions on commerciality in diving, and the time taken to optimise and caption images may be more profitably spent doing something else!

I know several categories of photographer: some simply enjoy photography and will not sell their images, others are determined to make money out of their photos and spend inordinate amounts of time trying and ending up with little return. Yet others (myself included) treat photography as a business and specialise - even so it is not the easiest of ways to make a living and you need a great deal of commitment and enthusiasm to suffer the bad periods which are an inevitable part of business life.

There used to be a saying that you made £1/year/image held by a library! I doubt that this is still true and its probably dropped well down on this.