The Joy of Sell­ing Stock Photos

Like other pho­tog­ra­phers, I occa­sion­ally get some e-​mails with oppor­tu­ni­ties for sell­ing stock pho­tos. Some­one always has a need for images to use in a doc­u­ment, a book, for an adver­tise­ment or poster. Unless they have a very spe­cific need, such as a com­pany pro­mot­ing their own prod­uct, it makes more sense for them to search for an image that con­veys their mes­sage than to com­mis­sion a photo shoot. They head to the Inter­net and start typ­ing in search terms to find it.

That presents a dilemma for some pho­tog­ra­phers. They want to know how they can make their pho­tos stand out more in search results. The answer is much sim­pler than most peo­ple think and I was reminded of it last week by Serge Ramelli on an episode of The Grid ask­ing if there is money in pho­tog­ra­phy. Serge’s advice was straight-​forward, yet missed by many photographers.

If you want some­one to find your pho­tos in a search engine, use text that a per­son is likely to use in a search engine. In other words, call it by the name of your sub­ject rather than some artis­tic name that is mean­ing­less to a search engine. Con­sider the photo I posted above and the title in the caption.

U.S. Capi­tol Build­ing Reflection

I could have called this photo any­thing else. For exam­ple, I could have named it “By Inferno’s Light” and felt clever, but that’s not going to help it show up in search results for peo­ple who want a photo of the U.S. Capi­tol build­ing. Search engine spi­ders can­not see the photo, so they have to rely upon text to under­stand what it is and pro­vide infor­ma­tion to return it in a search result. There are a few things you can do to help the search engines find your photo.

• File­name — Give it a file name that describes the subject.
• Alt Tag — This is the field that the search spi­der reads to describe the photo. Per­haps you could call it “By Inferno’s Light” in the Title tag, but you want to call it “U.S. Capi­tol Build­ing” in the Alt tag.
• H1 Title — Search engines work on the the­ory that infor­ma­tion in an H1 tag are impor­tant, so use your photo descrip­tion in an H1 tag — just as I did above this section.
• Cap­tion — The search engine may find your photo, but a per­son is going to review the search engine results. Use this space to describe your photo for a human, includ­ing giv­ing your copy­right info and name.

Addi­tional Licens­ing Issues

Most of the requests I receive to license my pho­tos fall into three broad categories.

1. Gov­ern­ment (Wash­ing­ton, D.C. area, NASA)
2. Dis­ney
3. Star Wars

Although I have a few por­traits, I’ve never received a request to license any of them. That doesn’t sur­prise me, as I think most times when some­one needs a model, they want to cre­ate their own pho­tos and ensure all of the model releases are in place. The last thing they want is to license an image from a pho­tog­ra­pher and then get sued by a model because she never pro­vided them with a release (or the one the pho­tog­ra­pher had didn’t cover the usage). That’s not to say that peo­ple don’t buy stock images with mod­els. They do it all the time. How­ever, I need to rep­re­sent those images prop­erly if I expect to make money sell­ing stock pho­tos of people.

With that in mind, I always find it odd that peo­ple want to license my pho­tos of Dis­ney and Star Wars sub­jects. Some I under­stand, such as a Dis­ney image for a travel guide­book. Oth­ers sur­prise me, though. I received a request to use my photo of Han Solo frozen in car­bonite to use on the label of a skin care product.

It’s not that I don’t want to make some money licens­ing these pho­tos, but I also want sat­is­fied clients. That’s why I always give them the caveat about using these images. While I own the copy­right of the photo, Dis­ney owns its trade­marks and other legal claims to the sub­jects of these pho­tos. That means my poten­tial client not only needs to license the photo from me, but also to license the rights to use the char­ac­ter or sub­ject from Dis­ney before they make any com­mer­cial usage of the image. Once I bring that up, I can hear the sale slip­ping away from me like a bal­loon los­ing air. Phhhhttt!

On the other hand, I can license gov­ern­ment pho­tos all day long. Guess who wants to use my pho­tos of U.S. gov­ern­ment loca­tions the most? The U.S. Gov­ern­ment itself, or at least dif­fer­ent branches of it. To date, not a sin­gle per­son from the gov­ern­ment who inquired about licens­ing one of my pho­tos has ever come forth with a bud­get. Uncle Sam doesn’t like to pay for pho­tos, either. I’m sure that some­one is sell­ing stock pho­tos to the U.S. Gov­ern­ment, but I’m on the wrong end of that transaction.

Take a look at how you’re pre­sent­ing your own pho­tos. Are you mak­ing it easy for photo buy­ers to find you? If not, start chang­ing the text you put in those four areas men­tioned above.