3 months ago I started with the agency Shutterstock. If you want to be accepted as a contributor, you need to apply for it. For that you need to take your 10 best photos and with best I mean best because they need to be 100% good. If its not 100% sharp or if you can see just a little noise for example, then they will reject them. And they reject many.

After you decided which of your photos are suiable for selling them you upload them. Once they are uploaded you give the photo a titel and put at least 7 keywords (better more). Then you decide 1 or 2 categories for your photos.

When you are done with filling in the online form you submit them. Now you need to wait.

Out of these 10 photos 7 will need to be accepted to make sure just good photographers are going to be contributor on Shutterstock and not every beginner, which makes the whole thing already a bit harder.

Don’t give up if after you first try you’re not accepted yet. You can try it as often as you want but you will have to wait a month until you can try it again.

Also I could recommend if you want to be accepted to take new photos. In the most cases its not worth editing them, at least to me, take some new ones and upload these. You will still be able to edit them and upload them after you were accepted as a contributor but as long as you’re trying to get your 7 out of 10 images accepted you don’t want to risk to get it rejected again.

Once you’re accepted you don’t need to upload 10 photos anymore. You can upload as many photos as you want but they will still review them and reject them just as easy as they do when you apply.

 

Now now I am going to talk about the sales. What can you expect? Well, this depends a lot on you. How much time can you put in this? How high is the quality of your photos?

The more time you have to take photos, the bigger your portfolio will be. And the higher the quality of your photos is, the higher is the percentage of the photos which are going to be accepted and also the chance that they sell increases.

Pretty much everything can sell. Just be creative and think about what someone could want to buy. For every kind of photo there will be a customer just some sell more and others almost don’t sell. Make sure that there is something special about your photo. There are many photos of everything already so you need to make sure that your photo is better. Pay attention on details so that your photo is different from others.

Once you start having sales there are different kinds for your customer to buy it. Either they have a subscription and download your photo then you would get $0.25 per downloaded photo. If they buy them on demand you get up to $1.88 and if they buy an enhanced license then you will earn $28 with it.

But before you start getting too excited, the biggest part of the sales will be the ones for $0.25. The thing about Shutterstock is that you better have a large portfolio so that you sell many for small money that a very few for more money.

 

Good luck with applying to it! You can share your experiences by leaving a comment below!