Is it still possible to make money from stock photography?

Stock photography has long played an important role in photographers’ revenue streams thanks to its ability to generate passive income from images. But where the stock industry was once lucrative to the point where some photographers could make a comfortable living from stock photography alone, this is unfortunately no longer the case.

Digital photography and the ability for almost anyone to sign-up to some stock libraries have flooded the market with images, which has in part driven down the royalties photographers receive; it’s a simple case of supply and demand. But that’s not to say that the larger libraries such as Adobe Stock, Alamy, iStock, Getty, Shutterstock and many more are redundant since they can all provide that all-important passive income, albeit a modest one.

So, while you may not make a fortune from using one or more of these larger libraries to license your images, it’s still worth considering them because they can provide an additional revenue stream regardless of how profitable. You just have to consider the amount of work involved in preparing, uploading and keywording images against the potential income their sales will generate.

There are also other ways to license and sell your images, and that’s what we’re going to concentrate on here with four approaches to licensing and selling images in both digital and physical formats using alternative approaches to the traditional stock model. The advantage of these is that