Would anyone want to buy images already sold RF, I don't think so. That leaves new untried images and unsold works that have proved to have little demand.  I don't know about you, but I think that the next image I upload is better than the last and maybe that new best seller. They could buy my unsold stuff in batches cheap enough, but would they just choke up the auction with crap?

I think also if this existed photographers would start shooting original images for this in mind when they are shooting other ideas..  Not sure what you would make on a auction sale of photos. The auctions would be timed for winning bids. That could be as little as a dollar for a image or maybe hundreds of dollars depending on the image. This might be a way for the photographer to defer some of the cost of travel photography or model cost.

That's the whole idea of an auction, the deadline. Clearly some images would never sale. Then again some will always find a buyer because of the deadline. Maybe....maybe Not....

Consider the auction idea from the perspective of the customer/buyer. If the buyer is working on a project such as a calendar or book with a need for a lot of images, the auction buying would get very cumbersome. I.E. place bids on 12 images. Wait days or weeks, pay for a couple of winners but then search and start bidding on replacements for the losers. Wait days or weeks. Repeat until the image need is filled. I cannot think that image buyers have the available time line in their projects to buy images in this open ended timeline (may be multiple bidding failures to buy the last image for the project), if the sales auction bidding covers many days. If the bid cycle is, say, one day, then there is not sufficient buyer competition in the market to run the price up.

With a long bidding cycle, the buyers will have to track and juggle a significant database of images to be bought. Then eBay style sniping software will have to be generated to make those last minute high bids automatically. I can see buyers getting lost in what is bought, in bid, and failed such that their projects are chaos. It would take live databases for major buyers to track the auction buying status.

A newsletter editor may write a newsletter article today for the newsletter that goes out tomorrow. With a long bidding cycle the newsletter editor cannot be in the photo auction market due to time constraints.

In the end, after the image is used on something like a calendar or newsletter, the buyer likely has no need to hold copyright. So perhaps they set up a secondary sales site of their own and auction off the used images and try to recoup some of their costs. Now "my" images are competing against me.

I'm not sure the auction idea will play out well in this form. But keep working on the ideas - we certainly need them.

.....  On the other hand, if you would make "small collections" and sell these with RF licences through Ebay, Etsy etc. ... that might work.  Example :  a collection of Christmas images, as a download or on dvd, in high resolution.  A bit like the packs sold by SS.

been there - ebay doesnt allow digital downloads, so you'd have to send a dvd -- at low prices, that's a lot of hassle (ebay takes 15% of price PLUS s/h charges, and miimum shipping cost is $3)

early on, i offered a series of dvds w 50-100 images each - little to no sales. and it's stil easier to go to aa site w millions of images rather than search for a collection that might have a few images you want. and you'd STILL have to wait for the mail