How To Make Money With Stock Photography

If you’re looking for ways to make extra money, you’re not alone. Side hustles have exploded in popularity in recent years, with getting on for half of the population (43% of Brits in 2024) making money from an additional source of income alongside their regular job.

Source: Finder’s Side Hustle Statistics

There are all sorts of options out there, if you’re looking for ideas to get started - and we’ve put together a list of some of the best side hustles as inspiration for anyone uncertain of what they’d like to do.

If you’re an amateur photographer, though, or even a professional, you might have wondered about stock photography. Perhaps you’ve heard of some of the highest earning stock photographers out there, who have managed to become millionaires from their work. You might not expect to reach those heights, but surely that’s a good sign there’s good money to be made?

Well, yes and no. You can make money from stock photography, but experts tend to agree it won’t be easy. However, with enough dedication and determination, it’s possible to get to a point where you not only make money from your photography, but have an ongoing passive income boosting your earnings.

In this article, we’ll take you through the fine details of stock photography as a side hustle, so you’ve got all the information you need to know before deciding whether to jump in and start selling stock images yourself.

What Is Stock Photography?

Stock photography refers to images available for businesses (or individuals) to buy and use for commercial purposes. Stock photography agencies host vast collections of stock photographs - numbering into the tens or hundreds of millions - which can be searched by customers for the most suitable image for their purposes.

Stock photography encompasses as wide a range of subjects as can be imagined, so that no matter how specific the image you’re looking for, you’ll probably be able to find it. This can result in some truly bizarre photos. It’s hard to imagine, for example, a situation in which you’d need an image of a couple dancing while wearing unicorn and dinosaur masks. However, if you ever find yourself in need of such an image, you’re covered!

And for this near-infinite variety of photos to be sold, someone has to shoot them. That’s where stock photographers come in, producing large numbers of photos and making them available through stock photography agencies for purchase.

How To Get Started With Stock Photography?

If you’re a keen photographer, whether amateur or professional, you’ve probably got a hard drive full of images already. It’d be nice to think you could just upload the lot to Shutterstock, sit back, and let money start flowing in, but unfortunately it’s not quite as simple as that.

To be successful as a stock photographer, you need to be taking images that businesses or individuals actually need, and it’s unlikely that many of your existing images will fit the bill.

For the best chance of success, you’d be wise to follow the steps below as you start to build your business.

1. Write out a business plan

Before you dive in, you should fully plan out your business, and make realistic predictions for your profits based on the amount of work you can realistically do. It might not be as exciting as getting straight to work with your camera and uploading your first few shots, but it’s an important first step.

As with any side hustle, you’re more likely to succeed if you treat it as a serious business, not just a hobby. That means taking as much care of the boring business side of things as of the fun stuff - and if you can’t muster enough motivation to write out a business plan, you’ll probably struggle to make any real money from your side hustle.

2. Pick a niche

You might be tempted to go with a scattershot approach, producing stock photos across all sorts of genres and subjects, but this is unlikely to be the most profitable choice. The most successful stock photographers have identified a particular niche, and they take photos that meet the needs of users within that niche.

A company or individual is often looking for something quite specific when they go hunting for a stock photo, and it doesn’t always exist - at least, not in the style or quality they’re looking for. If you can be the photographer who meets a user’s need for images of, say, toddlers show jumping on goats (though good luck capturing those shots!), they’re likely to check your portfolio first the next time they need a similar image.

3. Ensure your equipment meets your needs

If you’re already a photographer, you’ve probably got an excellent camera already, but that might not be enough. It may do the job just fine for a lot of types of photography, but for wildlife or sports photography, for example, you’d need a camera with an extremely high burst rate to capture images of people or animals moving at speed. You’ll also need to ensure that your lenses are appropriate for the type of stock photography you’re getting into.

For professional-looking stock photos, you’re likely to need to invest in lighting equipment, and you might want to set up a studio of some sort within your home. All of this can be a significant outlay, potentially before you start making any money from your new side hustle, so should be factored into your business plan when you write it.

4. Sign up to an agency (or several)

Your eventual customers will need to find your photos somehow, if they’re going to buy them, and for the vast majority of stock photographers, that means going through an agency, such as Shutterstock, Alamy, Stocksy or iStock.

Many stock photographers will sell photos through multiple agencies, especially as different agencies will be more successful for selling certain genres or styles of image, and they might not all be willing to accept every image.

5. Build up an online portfolio

Although you’ll expect your sales to come through stock agencies primarily, it’s still worth having your own portfolio online. If someone finds that one or more of your images is particularly suited to their needs, they may go looking for more of your photography. If so, you want them to find it as easily as possible.

Sometimes a customer will even go as far as to contact you to request custom stock photography, which is vastly more profitable for you. It’s therefore very much worth your time to create yourself a website and portfolio to maximise the chances of this happening.

How Much Can You Make?

If you’ve spent any time looking into the financial side of stock photography, you’ve probably found claims of income ranging from only a few pence to thousands of pounds a month. Which isn’t particularly helpful when you’re trying to make an informed decision.

The reality is that it isn’t easy to make a good income from stock photography, and you certainly shouldn’t go into it expecting to make a lot of money quickly. However, if you’re planning to create stock images as a side hustle, rather than as your main living, then it certainly is possible to make some extra money from stock photography.

The key to earning reasonable money from stock photos is volume. On most stock image agencies, a buyer will be able to purchase the right to use an image royalty-free for a very small sum and you, as the photographer, will be paid an even smaller sum after the agency takes its cut.

Agencies may also adjust their rates depending on how successful you are as a contributor. Shutterstock, for example, offers you only 15% of what a customer pays to licence your image if your images have been licenced up to 100 times within the last year, but as much as 40% when you hit over 25,000 licences in a year.

You therefore can’t expect to make significant amounts of money from only a few shots. Your stock of images will probably need to be in the thousands before you start seeing a good monthly return. Experienced stock photographers estimate that you’ll need to have several thousand good quality images uploaded in order to earn a few hundred pounds per month - and it takes a lot of time to capture, edit and upload such an enormous number of photos.

As a result, the majority of aspiring stock photographers quit long before they reach this point - which is easy to understand. It could take years of hard work to build up to making just a few hundred pounds a month, and for a lot of people there are easier ways to boost their income.

However, that doesn’t mean you won’t be successful, or that it isn’t worth trying at all. There are plenty of stock photographers making an excellent living, and the great thing about stock photos is that they can continue to make you money long after you initially upload them, resulting in a level of passive income, which increases as your portfolio grows.

Types Of Stock Photography

There are two main types of stock photography: macrostock and microstock. Usually, when people talk about stock photography, they’re talking about microstock, but it’s useful to be aware of both and of the differences between them.

Macrostock

Macrostock photography is also known as ‘traditional stock photography’, and is by far the most lucrative form. Images are sold on an exclusive basis and at much higher prices - a buyer will pay for the right to use an image exclusively for a year, and could pay anything from around £20 to well over £1000 a year for the rights to the image.

Getty Images is the best known macrostock agency, but any agency selling ‘rights managed’ or RM images is counted as a macrostock agency. Macrostock agencies are generally very selective as to the photographers whose images they will accept, making it quite tricky to get into macrostock photography.

Microstock

Microstock photography is the bread and butter of the vast majority of stock photographers. This is the easiest type of stock photography to get into, but much less well paid.

Microstock images are sold on a royalty-free basis, and a buyer will usually pay a subscription to allow them to download a certain number of images per month, or unlimited images. Instead of royalties, photographers are paid per download of their images. Microstock agencies are much less picky about the images they will accept, and most will allow anybody to sign up as a photographer (although they will review all images that are submitted to them, and accept or reject them depending on demand and image quality).

Advantages Of Stock Photography As A Side Hustle

• If you’re already a photographer, you’ve probably already got the expertise and most of the equipment to get started

• You can fit your photography around your existing schedule, taking and editing your images as and when suits you

• For hobbyist photographers, it’s a chance to indulge your creativity

• Your income will build as your portfolio does, and you should enjoy a level of passive income once you’ve been going for a while

• Stock photos can drive customers to your main online portfolio, potentially gaining you additional, more profitable business

Disadvantages Of Stock Photography As A Side Hustle

• If you aren’t already a professional photographer, you may need to make a major investment in equipment in order to get going

• There’s no guarantee of making any money. In contrast to working as, say, an events photographer, where you’ll be booked for a specified price in advance, when you take stock photos you have no guarantee that anyone will ever want to buy them.

• The amounts you make will probably be quite small, especially to start with

• You have no control over who uses your work - which means it could end up being used to promote products or ideas you personally don’t agree with, or find morally objectionable

• There’s a high barrier to entry. Unless you’re already a skilled photographer, you’ll need to invest a lot of time and effort into building the skills necessary to take saleable stock photographs

• There’s a lot of competition out there. There are over 1 million contributors on Shutterstock alone, all of them competing to sell their images. With so many stock photographers all over the world to compete with, it’s difficult to avoid getting lost in the crowd.

Tips And Tricks For Success As A Stock Photographer

1. Do your research

One of the best ways to boost your chances of succeeding as a stock photographer is to perform detailed research before you decide on your niche. Although there are millions upon millions of stock photos out there, it’s still perfectly possible for a company or individual to go looking for a specific image and be unable to find exactly what meets their needs.

Try putting yourself in the position of a company and imagine what they might want to use in their promotional material. Can they find it through a stock agency? If not, you might have discovered a niche that needs filling, and you could be the one to fill it.

It’s also important to ensure the keywords you use to describe your images will allow the customers you’re targeting to find them. Perform keyword research to find out what your target market is searching for, and add keywords accordingly to make certain that their search results will include your images.

2. Think about brands and copyright

One of the most important tips for budding stock photographers is to avoid logos. You’re hoping to sell your images to brands, who won’t want to be inadvertently advertising other companies in their material.

This can be harder to achieve than you might expect - if you use models in your stock images, for example, you’ll need to ensure that none of their clothing displays a logo, and any props that feature in your images will need to be angled to hide any logos or branding.

Less obvious copyright issues can also crop up, so it’s important to research the subject you’re photographing. For example, it’s illegal to sell images of the Eiffel Tower lit up at night, as the light show itself is protected by copyright.

3. Get permission

Most agencies will require you to produce signed release forms if your photography includes models, to prove that they’ve agreed to the use of their likeness. This can also apply to recognisable buildings - so if you’re photographing property, make sure to ask the owner to sign a release.

It’s worth noting, though, that if the model isn’t identifiable from the photo, a model release isn’t necessary - so shots just including hands, for example, are exempt from this requirement. The only thing to bear in mind is that it’s not just a model’s face that could identify them - if they have a tattoo on their body, that could be enough. It’s therefore best to double check for recognisable details before uploading any such images.

4. Make use of available tools

It’s important to make use of the tools available to you to maximise your chances of success. For example, it’s worth investing in professional photo editing software, rather than trying to make do with a cheaper option, to ensure that your photos are of the best possible quality and have the best chance of earning you money.

You can also access software specifically designed to make your life as a stock photographer easier. Multi-marketplace upload software allows you to upload an image to all the major microstock agencies at once, saving you huge amounts of time. There are often both free and premium options available, but for any significant volume you’ll probably need to take out a premium plan. A couple of the most popular tools are Stocksubmitter and ImStocker Studio, but there are a number of other services out there as well.

On top of this, stock agencies make tools available to their contributors, such as software to help detect copyright infringement, keywording helpers and statistical data on trends in stock photo sales, to help you maximise your profits.

When Stock Photos Become Famous

Every so often, stock photography hits the news or goes viral. You may recognise one particular stock photo model, nicknamed ‘Hide the Pain Harold’ whose stock images have been extensively meme-ified, to the point of him being recognised when out in public.

Of course, a stock photo going viral doesn’t necessarily mean success for its photographer. Trying to enforce copyright on an image being reproduced thousands of times a day as it’s made into memes is almost impossible, so you won’t necessarily see much of an increase in profits as a result. On the other hand, it’s bound to result in more people checking out your work, which certainly isn’t a bad thing.

Tax And Accounting Considerations

If you’re UK based, starting a stock photography side hustle means you will, sadly, have to think about tax. If you’ve made over £1000 from your side hustle in a tax year (which runs April to April), you’ll need to submit a tax return. And if your total income, including both your regular job and your new side hustle, is over the personal tax allowance, you’ll need to pay tax on your earnings.

Because stock photography agencies operate all over the world, you may also have to account for payments in other currencies. Some agencies will convert your earnings into your currency before making payment, but you may have to convert yourself through PayPal. Agencies may also require you to submit tax forms when signing up as a contributor, even if you aren’t based in the US.

Summary

It’s certainly possible to make money with stock photography, but it’s not for the faint of heart. You’ll need to be dedicated, persistent, willing to adapt to the market, and patient enough to stick it out until decent money starts to come in.

Given the high barrier to entry and the cost of professional equipment, it’s not a side hustle we’d recommend unless you’re already a keen photographer. If you’re looking for something that’s a little easier to get into, why not think about pet/house sitting or audio transcription, or perhaps try out Matched Betting?