Experiences with Stock Agencies

In this short article I want to share my personal experiences what I have made with stock agencies in the recent years. The overview about the agencies where I work with may help someone who is looking for a stock agency to sell pictures. My portfolio contain mainly travel pictures and other photographers may have made opposite experiences with the same agencies. My experiences are not representive and I recommend to get as much information as possible also by other sources.

Review

As long as I can think back I like to travel and to make photos on the trips. So I already started in 2009 to load up a my first pictures to a stock agency, but in the review I have to admit today, that my first attempts to earn money were not done with the necessary seriousness. Only a few pictures I had uploaded to Panthermedia and I was happy and satisfied when my first sales were made, but at that time I was far away from falling into a sales fever.

Not until 2016 I have started to see the stock agencies as an opportunity to improve the personal income. Finally traveling and photography are not the cheapest leisure activities. Why not earn some additional money with my hobby and reduce that monetary expenditure I asked myself and so I started a new and more serious try to sell my pictures.

New start

I started with some more registrations at different agencies. Previously I had already found out that these agencies should have enough traffic and sales to give me the opportunity to become a successful image seller.

My selection: 123rf, Adobe, Alamy, Dreamstime, iStock, Panthermedia and Shutterstock.

Experiences

Here are my experiencse from the recent years:

123rf

123rf: Advertising and editorial images. Customer-friendly navigation on the website. The decision to approve or reject an image takes a long time. To speed up the evaluation, an extra request must be sent for processing. Many images are also simply rejected for reasons that are incomprehensible. From my point of view, this agency is currently less recommendable.

Adobe

Adobe: Commercial images, editorial images without people. The upload process and approvals are completed in a reasonable amount of time. Customer-friendly navigation on the website. Agency with very good turnover. Currently my best agency.

Alamy

Alamy: Commercial and editorial pictures. Customer-friendly navigation on the website. Alamy do just quality checks and not a legal assessment with the uploaded pictures. The pay per image is very good compared to other agencies.

Dreamstime

Dreamstime: Commercial and editorial pictures. Customer-friendly navigation on the website. The upload process and the pictures approval is very quick.

iStock/gettyimages

iStock/gettyimages: Commercial and editorial images. The agency takes some getting used to and requires a slightly different workflow. Turnover is already achieved with just a few images.

Panthermedia

Panthermedia: Commercial and editorial pictures. Panthermedia was the first stock agency were I load up my first pictures. In the time today the upload is quick, the websit navigation is also okay. By using Quicklive the pictures are very fast online, but it could be that they will be rejected some weeks later. The quantity of sales is very low.

Shutterstock

Shutterstock: Commercial and editorial images. Customer-friendly navigation on the website. The upload process and decisions on approvals are quick. This is where most of the sales are made, but Shutterstock’s sales per image, and therefore revenue, have plummeted in recent years.

Portfolio development and earnings

Development of my portfolios and the earnings in the last 5 years:

Conclusion

The efforts and time requirements to bild up a portfolio at an agency should not be underestimated. Especially at the beginning it can be very frustrating if the numbers of pictures in the portfolio is increasing but the sales don’t follow. On such times it is important to be strong and doggedly. The best is just to find the right agency from the beginning on and to have fun with increasing sales und success.

Last update: 19 January 2025


Impressions from photo tours through Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia