I don't have any images in data licensing and have a small portfolio (602 images), but I got a few dollars from the contributor fund this week.

My sales on ss have been pretty abysmal since I reactivated my portfolio a little over a year ago. I make more than 10x as much on Adobe. I was making a lot more before I deactivated it - now both the sums I'm paid and my number of sales are awful and I don't think it's ever going to rebound. In retrospect, I'm sorry that I deactivated my portfolio as I only hurt myself.

Yes. Sometimes it's the only camera I have with me and many of them have been licensed, including a few at good (non-micro) prices. I have an iPhone 12 and I use Photoshop to process the raw files - I'm generally very light with my editing, though I have also used textures and filters on some that have sold, though generally the lightly edited images sell better. I mostly have them on Stockimo and Adobe - though a handful on Dreamstime (from my old 6S) that are exclusive from ancient "contests" there have been selling regularly for years. 

I mainly shoot with a 42MP and a 61MP A7rii & iv, but for use on the web iPhone images are fine. I've even printed a few that have been in gallery shows.

IMHO, it's the composition, not the pixel peeping that counts. That spur of the moment inspiration that makes me take it out of my pocket and shoot.

Anyone having trouble today uploading? Seems like new files can't be processed. I added 23 yesterday with no issues. Didn't want to start another thread for what's hopefully a temporary issue. Thanks.

Sorry for your illness. It can be so frustrating.
Even if you can't take photos, can you upload photos that you have on your hard drive? If you made $42 from only 34 images, maybe you can make it to $100 by adding some new ones? Also, you can change the settings so that your unsold photos don't go to the free section. I've had unsold images suddenly sell there so don't let them give yours away.
They also take AI images, perhaps you are well enough to make them?
DT is a frustratingly slow earner. It's a shame that they aren't reading your emails since you are in a unique situation. Good luck.

I make more on fine art sales than on stock sites but that's a combination of POD sites such as Fine Art America (where many of my best-sellers have been selling for 10+ years), direct sales, and through art agents. I only have around 900 files on FAA and I spent years marketing them on social media. I've cut back on the marketing and sales have slowed but are still pretty good. I do better with agents who take a huge cut of my sales, so I make much less per sale, but they do the marketing for me and it adds up much faster than FAA. POD is a lot more work than stock and a different market. I also show my work in galleries in the NY tri-state area and make occasional sales that way.

Honestly, I made much more when I was doing photo assignments but between Covid and lingering health issues, I've switched my focus to photography I can do on my own time. Editorial assignments earned me okay but not a living wage, however, they helped me get commercial assignments for local businesses which earned me substantially more. If photography is your full time business, assignments can be the way to go.

But yes, I've found POD sites worthwhile but only in combination with other outlets. I also license stock directly but that took years of finding clients too and still requires a lot of contact.

There's no get rich quick answer and depending on what type of images you shoot, stock can be a better outlet than POD or vice-versa. With stock, you don't have to market, the agencies do it for you but they also take the lion's share of the profits. On POD sites I can earn $$$ from one sale, which is rare for a single stock photo license although that can happen too. This month I netted over $300 from a single license on Stockimo (the Alamy app that they are now discontinuing) but again that's rare - I usually get 2-3 $$$ licenses on Alamy in a year these days, it's the $$ licenses that add up.

You still need a lot of $$$ sales to make decent income from photo sales and the steady daily licenses from microstock also add up. You can try Fine Art America with 25 images on their no cost plan, or for only $30 you can upload an unlimited number. If you have 2,000 good images to sell, why not try it for a few years and see how it goes?

Redbubble is another outlet for merchandise like mugs and T-shirts (occasional prints). They now charge you if you don't sell enough - I've made enough sales there over the years with a very small portfolio so I'm not getting charged but I find my illustrations do better than my photographs though photo stickers sell. The markup on merchandise is small though so you have to sell a lot. And when I cut back on marketing myself sales slowed.

Good luck!

Thanks Mat!
Great idea Jasmin!

You can do a keyword search if you hit the link to your portfolio in the dashboard. You can then search your  portfolio from there. It's clunky but at least it can be done. Like Jasmin, I use collections to see where I have holes in my collection.

I wish Adobe would bring back the Adobe Collection plug-in option in Lightroom. It was a great way to keep track of what I'd uploaded and also to collect stuff I wanted to upload all in one place - e.g. travel images from the same location taken at different times - without the need to make additional copies in a separate folder to upload. I know there's a new upload from folder option but that defeats the purpose of Lightroom letting you make collections without the need to duplicate files. Adobe has such great software, it's a shame we don't get the benefits on Adobe Stock. 

Speaking of software, Mat, any chance we'll get another year of LR/PS or Illustrator for meeting certain sales goals?

I've gotten a few of these types of scam attempts recently.

The first was someone on Instagram who wanted to buy one of my works to use as a reference photo for an NFT for $1,000. I was extremely skeptical since they could purchase a stock photo extended license for far less, but since she had actually singled out the work she wanted, and sent me a couple of messages, I agreed to take a look at the proposed contract, in the hope that I was wrong. As soon as I read the "contract," I knew my misgivings had been correct. It purported to make me responsible for upfront costs, which they'd "cover" by sending me more than the $1,000 price for use of the image - a big red flag - your bank can "cash" a check for you based on your own balance covering it, only to discover several days later that it has actually bounced, meanwhile the contract required me to be responsible for various costs on a very tight timeline - before the time it would take to discover a check or credit card payment was actually no good. I politely declined her offer.

I've gotten DMs on twitter too asking if my work is for sale - when it's clear from any link that it is, followed by "I'd love to buy it as an NFT" - without specifying a specific work - another big red flag. I just respond politely that my work is not available as an NFT. I probably shouldn't waste my time responding at all but since I've had individuals, publishers and galleries contact me out of the blue who were legitimately interested in showing, licensing or buying my work, on the off chance that my cynicism has made me assume a legitimate inquirer is a scammer, I always respond politely even when I'm saying "no."

Since NFTs require you to spend money up front, they seem like the perfect way for a scammer to get your money. And if they offer to pay for the NFT costs up front and then send you more than needed, requiring you to repay the difference, or pay others, well, that's just a reworking of an old photo scam from the early 2000's. 

@ZeroTalent  Thanks for bringing this to people's attention - that some here don't believe you is a testament to how scammers stroke photographer's egos and why conmen have been succeeding for eons. It's easy for me to spot a bogus "contract" but I practiced law in NYC for over a decade. It's also easy to understand how much we want an offer to buy our work to be legit - I actually agreed to look at the "contract" even though I really knew deep down that it would be bogus. Human nature. Now I just politely decline so as not to waste my time.

I'd worry too if they are sending you to their own bitcoin site, that they can get more than whatever costs you're paying upfront, since this might give them private banking info? It could wipe you out, and my understanding is that none of this stuff is traceable.

I signed in to check and I still get the same old dashboard, but there is a banner on top telling me that something new and exciting is on its way. I'm in NY, ss's home base, so surprised it hasn't been rolled out here.

RM doesn't prevent theft or misuse. However, it can help with copyright violations.

Since no place else I license images uses the RM model anymore, I've marked my RM images on Alamy as exclusive. This got me a $250 copyright violation fee for an image of mine I found in a book that I wasn't paid for. Since the images was RM and exclusive to Alamy, Alamy chased up the use. It took nearly a year for them to collect and pay me (I finally got the payout in October of this year), and I brought the use to their attention. Still, even in this instance, it was the fact that it was exclusive to Alamy that made the difference. Moreover, the image had been credited to me and Alamy (which is how I found it) but with their loosey-goosey self-billing system, it never showed up on their end.

RM gives you more control over the use of images, letting you prohibit sensitive use, reproduction for fine art, etc. It also means that you are supposed to get paid a fee each time an image is used.

That control, however, can be elusive.

I have RM images on Alamy that they have licensed "in perpetuity," which might as well be RF. This is more and more common, and very frustrating.

A few years ago, Alamy licensed two images for a particular edition of a book under what appeared to be normal RM terms. Those two photos were reused in several subsequent editions of the book, without additional payment. When I notified them about this the first time, I was told that the license was worded to permit subsequent editions (despite the notation not appearing in the licensing info I received). Even at half the initial fee for subsequent editions, that's $$$$'s that neither Alamy nor I earned. Frustrating.

I have some photos that I often sell as fine art on Alamy as RM, with "do not sell for personal use" (i.e. one-off fine art prints) ticked as a restriction, so it doesn't undermine my prices. A couple of years ago, however, Alamy sold a series for $169 each, one was personal use for prints (an older scenic from the same area that I uploaded before Alamy changed the way we added RM restrictions). The other two images, "ticked as "not for personal use," were sold for newsletter use. I assume they were all printed but there was no way I could check on the license. I made less than I would have for a decent sized print, but at least it was a couple hundred to me, and not the measly $10 or so I'd get when they license RF images for print. Cynically, I assume they did it this way to make it worth enough to me that I wouldn't make a fuss.

My decision about when to make an image RM has evolved over time.

When I started in 2008, I used to agonize over which images should be which, which to upload to Alamy when all sales there were truly midstock or even macrostock prices, and this slowed me down in building my portfolio.

Then, I tried a few of my best travel images as RF on the micros and they made me way more $$$.

So, I think RM is worthwhile for certain images but most of my stock portfolio, even on Alamy, is RF. And my criteria for marking some as RM has evolved as well.

These days, I am selling more scenic fine art prints, so RM has become a way for me to license certain botanical images to magazines, calendars and books while still selling prints. I also do a lot of black and white more abstract images, which I don't upload as stock, and which I wouldn't license except for use in a fine art book or art show catalog. There, an RM license, even if it is gratis for a catalog, lets me protect the use of the image.

So, yes for me, RM makes sense. I got a few decent $$$ licenses this year, but I also had a couple of $$$ RF licenses. And just this month, I had RM images license  $7 and 16.  So I don't think that prices for RF and RM are necessarily all that different. In my experience, at least, it's much more about having some control over the image's use.

I do this part time, so I don't have a ton of data, but I hope the examples I've given you, some older (e.g. the book and subsequent editions) but mostly from 2021-2023, help you make a decision.
 

After posting this in a much older thread I saw that people were scolded for reviving something so old so thought I'd start a new thread for Tear Sheets for this year and next:

https://www.aarp.org/home-family/voices/veterans/info-2023/top-cities-post-military-service.html

My model here is not a veteran - I know there was a NYTimes case that said it was okay to use an image of a person in this way even if they are not actually in the profession mentioned. Just glad it's his back. I submitted it as editorial only.

Actually, given today's prices I'm happy with this one - I made $30+ on ss for it, so I made payout LOL. I've hardly uploaded anything there in years, but it's generally my best bet for editorial images. They've licensed others from this set too.

I was driving from Ohio to New York and it was a beautiful autumn day. As we approached Harrisburg, PA, it seemed like a good place to stretch our legs. I took photos (of course) while wandering around. It's got a nice downtown area with pretty brick buildings. I enjoy architectural photography and managed to get in some of my steps despite a long day in the car. So I guess it was a win-win.

Interesting - thanks for sharing.

"Wonder Panic" is the perfect expression for all this. I find myself drawn to the speed and diversity of images that I can generate - I can set up a concept in minutes - while I'm similarly repulsed by the fact that my own work has been appropriated by these engines.

Disruption is certainly the key to all this - it's change for the sake of change rather than for any constructive purpose and there's no way to know where it will all lead.

Will AI be the final death knell for microstock? So weird than an industry - microstock - that started around 2005, will probably be gone less than 20 years after it began - but the concept of selling creative effort for pennies was probably never sustainable. Even without AI, it was those who appropriated our work in another way - the stock agencies that take 2/3rds or so of the profits - that were always making the bulk of the profits, disrupting the traditional photography market and making money off artist's work with their algorithms.

I've been wondering the same thing - Photoshop certainly makes it much easier than it used to be - but it still can take a lot of time to fix those little bits of background that aren't automatically removed.

I took a bunch of images of stuff intending to isolate them when Adobe first started accepting pngs, but since I was sick for much of the past couple of years, never got around to isolating and uploading them.  Then it was time to upload Christmas images and I took the easy road and uploaded illustrations that I had drawn in Photoshop on transparent backgrounds for the previous season.

It's hard to compare them to their "on white" counterparts since the images I uploaded the year before were all sets. Whereas, when Adobe started accepting pngs, I uploaded the isolated individual components to Adobe. I've sold sets more than isolated components, but it's really apples to oranges since the sets were online a year longer and offer more components than the pngs. It's also a very small set with a limited Christmas selling season.

I just finished processing a few AI kittens last week - some I isolated as pngs, but the whiskers were really a nightmare since I rarely do any compositing - I'm primarily a travel/editorial photographer and my fine art work is also realistic, so I'm not sure it's worth my time.

I assume most designers who need components can isolate them quickly themselves, but for small business people, bloggers, and art directors/photo editors who are on a deadline, I'd guess isolated components are very attractive. I assume that's why Adobe decided to offer them. And AI can't give you an isolated image so it might be worth the effort.

Like you, I'd be interested to hear how well they are selling for those who've got enough of them online to make a comparison between transparent and white backgrounds. I believe I've read here that they were big sellers on Canva - though I believe they cater more to the do-it-yourselfers than to designers.