How To Get Started With iStock Photo

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How To Get Started With iStock Photo

Thursday, April 2nd, 2009 Subscribe To Our Feed

iStockphoto is a very popular royalty free stock photography website - with both photographers and buyers. If you’re new to selling your photos at online stock photo websites though, it’s usually helpful to find overviews and reviews of the different sites available.

iStockphoto is one of the more popular stock photo sites online, so I thought it could help to give a closer look of my own initial thoughts on them. When I first started selling my photography at stock photo agencies online a couple of years ago, I didn’t sign up with iStock. I was concerned about some misuses I’d seen of photos from that site, and I also didn’t like their upload restrictions.

Since I’d been earning a decent stock photography income from other stock photo sites, I thought it might be time to finally give iStock a go. It’s reputed to be a top earning site for many photographers, and the number two earning site for most of the rest. I figured if I was serious about trying to earn my living as a freelance stock photographer, then I should make sure I submitted my images to a place which is often considered to be the top online stock photo agency.

Signing up at iStock can be done easily and doesn’t cost a thing. To become a contributing photographer though, you’ll need to go through a few hoops. The first thing you’ll need to do is submit an application to become a photographer. This means you’ll take a brief online questionairre style test first, then uploading your first three photos.

iStock only requires you to submit three pictures for your “test”. But all three of those pictures have to be approved before you’re actually able to start submitting more.

Some photographers think that first acceptance test is hard, but I personally didn’t have much of a problem. In fact, the only problem I ran into was the fact that I’m primarily a stock food photographer. I submitted two pictures with food and one people photo for my initial test of three, and I quickly found out that iStock prefers to see a variety of topics in your test images. So even though my photos were not similar in any way, since two of them were on the topic of food one was rejected.

Once I realized they wanted three different topics on the first submission, it was quick work to submit something different and become accepted.

Once you’ve passed your initial submission quality test, you can start uploading your photos to iStock. And this is the part that I personally detest. iStockphoto doesn’t let you upload your pictures via FTP and they also don’t provide a way to upload more than one photo at a time. You are forced to submit just one picture at a time, and this can be quite painful.

Another restriction that I’m not particularly happy about is their upload limits. As a new submitter to iStock, you are only allowed to upload 15 photos in a one week time frame. The time limits are rolling though, and that tends to help, but the restrictions make it impossible to get a decent sized stock photo portfolio built there quickly.

Rolling time frames with the upload restrictions are confusing to many new users too. It’s easy to understand once explained though: The restriction clock starts new with each photo you upload. So if you upload two pictures today and then 13 tomorrow, you’ll have reached your initial 15 upload limit. About 7 days afterwards you’ll see there are now two, not fifteen, upload spots open. That’s because you only uploaded two pictures your first day. A day or so after those new slots open, you’ll have another 13 open up though, since you put 13 pictures into the queue the second day.

Speaking of the queue, I’ve found the iStock takes roughly 5-7 days to review pending photos for new contributors. They apparently review photos from exclusive photographers much faster, but you’re not allowed to become an exclusive photographer with them until you’ve reached a specific dollar amount of sales.

Like all online stock photo agencies, iStock likes certain types of photos better than others. So when you first start submitting photos to them you may notice a high rejection rate. It won’t take too long to figure out what types of photos they prefer to see though, and then you’ll find yourself getting submissions approved more often.

Due to the painful and slow uploading and submission process there though, I have found myself dragging my heels with getting my stock photography portfolio onto their site. It took me several months just to get 42 photos online with them, and I only earned a little over twenty dollars in the same timeframe. So I still have quite a ways to go before I can call this site a good earner for me.

Despite these issues, any freelance photographer who wants to sell stock photos online should sign up with iStock. While their system may not be overly friendly to photographers, they do have a very large buyer base that no photographer should ignore.

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