The best free stock photos, royalty free images & videos shared by creators. The best stock photography submission platform is, without a doubt, Microstock, plus. While my list above might make Microstock, plus seem perfect, it’s as close to perfect as it comes in the world of stock photography. Yes, Microstock, plus is free to use, but that comes with limited monthly submissions.
If you want to submit more than 33 submissions per agency per month, that’s when Microstock, plus requires you to pay. However, what I love about Microstock, plus is that you can complete over 33 submissions in one month, and your file will simply move to a pending status that will automatically submit at the start of the next month without you having to do anything. You can close it and forget about it. Now, like any submission tool, Microstock, plus is a lot of work when you’re just getting started.
During this time, you will probably run out of submissions many times over if you’re starting with a big library, but paying once just to get your files online at the beginning is not that big of a barrier. Finally, it may appear that Microstock, plus charges storage fees, but they are easily avoidable. Paying for storage is only on the Microstock, plus platform. Once your file has been accepted with an agency, you can delete your files off of Microstock, plus to avoid the fee.
This will not delete your files off of various stock agency sites. It’s amazing that Microstock, plus supports FTP uploads, but in my experience, it’s really only useful when uploading larger video files. That being said, I recommend FileZilla, so that you can upload multiple video files directly to Microstock, plus at once. However, if you only plan to submit photos, the simple drag-and-drop browser feature is more than sufficient for smaller image files.
Microstock, plus is the best submission tool when it comes to the amount of stock agencies that you can submit to. However, there’s really only a handful of agencies that you should consider, which I’ll get to later. While most of the other submission platforms support the same large agencies, Microstock, plus is the only platform that supports StoryBlocks, which is a key agency for videographers. Other than my thoughts about the external program, the biggest red flag is that you have to visit each agency separately from the Xpiks program to manually submit your work.
No other stock submission tool in the industry requires this, which is why I default to Microstock, plus. With Microstock, plus, your work is submitted automatically as soon as you hit submit or through the pending feature that I mentioned earlier. Past what submission tool you choose to use, and I hope I made it clear why Microstock, plus is the best, it’s all about where you choose to sell your work. Take it from someone that signed up for every agency on Microstock, plus and tried them for a year to say that the only agencies that you should sell your work on are the ones mentioned below.
However, Pixpa has a terrible contributor interface, but at the very least, everything submits, tracks earnings, and works great straight from Microstock, plus. On the other hand, MostPhotos has a much more user-friendly interface, but it requires you to manually submit each photo individually from inside MostPhotos (like Xpiks) after first submitting on Microstock, plus. If you’re a busy photographer, this may not be worth your time. If an agency has a website that looks like it hasn’t been updated since 2003, stay away.
Cavan is not found through any submission platform, like Microstock, plus, because everything has to be done manually, image by image, through Cavan only. This is because they act both as an agency and as a submission platform, which I’ll explain in more detail below. There are a few other agencies, like 500px, 123rf, or YayImages, that look like good, clean, professional stock photography agencies, but what all of these and so many more have in common is terrible earnings because of terrible traffic. The world of stock photography can be very complicated and overwhelming because of the number of agencies, and the barrier to entry can feel more difficult to overcome than it actually is.
All that being said, yes, there are full-time stock photography contributors out there, and yes, I still have submissions for sale on my recommended platforms. What I can conclude is that if you want to make stock photography a full-time thing, or even a small, part-time portion of passive income, expect to dedicate countless hours not only to getting started but also to shooting. No, and while saying no isn’t entirely true, I think it’s important to understand my experience with stock photography. Whether you need a stock photo, stunning vector image, HD video clips, or Adobe Photoshop template, Adobe Stock has the perfect stock images, videos, and more to help you tell your story.
While it may seem like BlackBox isn’t worth the effort based on my thoughts above, it does have one key feature that can allow it to be the most passive form of stock photography on the market. All three of these agencies are similar enough to talk about as one, and combined, they pretty much set the industry standard for what stock photography is today. When I first decided to dive into photography full-time, I thought that I would do things like sell prints and stock photography to make money.
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