Stock photo upload - my experience so far

This has been one of the projects on my to do list for several years now in an attempt to create a passive income from the many many photographs that I have taken over the years. Having 1TB of images means there is a lot to go through and with the plethora of options out there, I have never found the time to actually get there. 

This week I started. The websites and promotions for people talking about lucrative side hustles make it look so easy. My reality - not so much! They say the best way to sell photos is to sell them off your website, but of course that means you have to promote yourself and work out payments and such - I'm not big or good enough for that!

From my research, these appeared to be good options for me:

1. Getty Images

2. Istock

3. Alamy

4. Shutterstock

However, as nothing is ever straightforward! Here's what happened:

1. Getty images was desirable because it has licenses to the big names such as the NY Times (I think I'm aiming too high here). This means of course, that they want to maintain a very high level of uploads, and it requires you to choose 3 images that you think best represent you as a photographer and then they will judge whether to accept you. How to choose only 3 images to best display my content? So difficult and it felt like I only had one chance at at (when in reality you probably can submit several times). I let this factor intimidate me so when I first started this last summer, this was a far as I got - thinking about which images to use. Dead end.

2. Istock is a micro stock company which is owned by Getty images. It felt more accessible and doable, but also a gateway to Getty. However, for both Getty and Istock (formerly istockphoto), you need to upload via an app and the website for contributor information has not been working at all this month - so, another dead end for now.

3. I went with the next option - Alamy. They seemed quite lucrative because they appear to pay between 40% and 50% of the sales value (compared to 15% on other stock websites). Once again, they want you to submit 3 sample photos - but this time it does not mention they will be used to judge you as a contributor, but mainly to see the technical quality of the sample images you would upload. Less pressure, somehow? I chose a couple of images - a couple from Antarctica, a landscape and penguins, and one from Albania. They seemed a relatively good representation of me as well. However - all 3 were rejected due to being insufficient quality - the wording they use is too soft/lacking definition. I can completely see that this is the case, but this puts a huge dampener on my whole scheme as most of my photo collection were taken at this or a similar resolution. People have been telling me for years to shoot in RAW format, but the files were too large and storage was expensive (and still is) so I didn't want to. I haven't regretted it until now, so I guess I deserve this. I read more online about how to improve the quality of your images and while there are free tools, they're not great, so most pathways lead to either Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Lightroom. I will openly admit that my skills in these programs are not great. There's a steep learning curve for PS, but less so for LR, so I started there. I sharpened the images and did some very basic editing, and of the 3 images, 1 was accepted, but the other two still have the same - too soft/lacking definition. This shows promise, but also a lot of work to get there! I haven't given up yet.

4. Meanwhile, I was also looking into Shutterstock. Many websites point to this as a good place to start for beginners. I signed up and they ask for more uploads at the beginning to get approved - 10-15 images. I collected a variety of images - some more of Antarctica and some others from Dubai, Iraq, Cuba, Suriname and even one from a German Fasching parade here in Oberusel. I modified them lightly in Lightroom and then off they went to uploads. Any photographer will likely roll their eyes at these discoveries as obvious, but perhaps they're worth mentioning. This is what I have discovered:

• Most travel photos have been quite heavily modified to reflect bright sparkling colours. Postcard quality as opposed to reality. This involves a lot of time and work. While Lightroom does allow you to edit in bulk, you need to prepare your settings beforehand. 
• People images are complicated: Two failed because they needed a model release. One of these seemed to be a mistake as the person was a tiny speck in the background. The second makes sense. However, this issue of needing model releases basically renders every single photograph of a person unusable unless they are a friend of mine. And do I really want to contact them and ask them to sign releases? Apparently the Fasching parade could have been submitted as an 'Editorial' photo rather than a 'Commercial' photo, but then this needs to be date and location timestamped. I submitted it as such (not forgetting to mention to the reviewer that it was a resubmission) but this time it was rejected for being too busy - "Noise / Artifacts: Content contains noise, film grain, compression artifacts, pixelation, and/or posterization that detracts from the main subject". Sigh.
• Pesky AI is taking over the world: Many of the other images I submitted were immediately ascribed with a new term 'Data Licensing Only'. Upon investigation this means that they probably have quite a few of these images and so they will not sell them for Commercial use but will put them in a library to be used by AI to learn more about photography. The payment rates for these have been put into what seems to be a slim-chance-to-likely-never payment category. There's a fund for it, that will be distributed at a future time in a different way than other photo payments. What is frustrating is that they are given this label without being given a choice, and once they have it, they cannot be submitted for commercial purposes or resubmitted for evaluation. This included things like Erbil city walls in Iraq and a Paramaribo Christmas tree (despite my search showing there are less than 11 images of such a thing in their database). I had some lovely spiral stairwell pictures, but since these are plentiful, they got sent to either 'data licensing' or the 'too similar content' bin. After the first instance I decided to opt-out of Data Licensing, but it seems Shutterstock will still assign your photos to this category even if you don't want to be considered for it. I now have to wait a whole month before I can opt back in to what is probably not really worth it anyway. Ho hum.
• Other minor rejection issues:
• Of a Tbilisi Georgia old city view: An English translation is required for non-English text that appears in content - it's just a minor sign on the road!
• Of another Tbilisi Georgia old city view: intellectual property rights (e.g. artwork, writing, sheet music, isolated modern architecture, or other objects protected by copyright) - for the building I'm assuming? 
• For my beautiful images of the sunlight passing into a Georgian church where the church is pretty unrecognizable: intellectual property rights again. 
• Of the 34 images I have submitted (and that took ages to select and prepare them), only 9 were approved for my portfolio. This is slow going. 
• Things that have been approved are random: a penguin, one of the several Tbilisi old city views I submitted (that didn't have any Georgian writing), sand ripples in Dubai, flamingoes, a panorama of Georgia (though the other similar one was only eligible for data licensing), a temple menorah, a carved stone window, the modern cathedral (how is this not an intellectual property rights?). Am I to assume I submit the failed ones after scrubbing the signage away and a third will get approved? Is this a statistics game? See my slowly growing and slightly pathetic portfolio here!
• Payment rates are low - 0.10c to 0.15c per photo, so you really only want marketable photos that will be used again and again. Do I really want to go out and take some fake looking photos of desktops, offices, currency, students backs (thus to avoid model releases).
• They basically only pay 15% despite advertising as high as 40%. There are higher rates for those that sell more photos, but you reset every year in January back to 15% so not many are likely to get any higher. Wouldn't it be a bummer, though, to get lots of sales just before Christmas?

My overall conclusion of this experience is that (of course), they really have too many submissions so will find as many reasons not to take your photos as they can. This is a time and numbers game. You need to have an enormous portfolio, and the ones that sell are not the ones that I appreciate and like. Do I really want to work at it? I do not have an hour to spend every day to only get 5 approved. I also don't see chances of getting paid licensing being very high - I'd have to get to $35 to get any money paid out anyway! How many photos is that? 250 sold or so. Do I want to pursue Alamy instead? 

I guess the positive on this one is that I've learned lots! Perhaps I should do a video on what I've learned except that won't earn me anything either! Haha!