Watch out Getty—there's a new kid in town. Photoshelter.com is a global stock photo site with more than 17,000 photographers and growing. They're paying photographers 20-30% more than all other stock houses—a generous 70% of every sale. As a result, they've built an impressive collection of high quality images in a short amount of time.
Sign Up/Submit. I decided to take the plunge and submit some images. First, I became a member (free). Their review process takes about 5 business days. I did a couple of searches and saw that they didn't have many fair or cowgirl shots, so I submitted a few images from my Dutchess County Fair and Cowgirl collections. Sure enough, after about 5 days, they emailed me a notification that most had been accepted. (Good idea to read up on what kinds of images they’re looking for. Just read a topic in the general forum from an established photographer whose image were rejected because they already had similar ones on file.)
Keywords. Their artist-friendly software made it painless to upload photos, assign keywords, attributes, and upload releases. They recommend assigning 15-30 keywords for every image. If you need help with this, they have great tips. Releases aren't required, but many companies won't use an image without knowing one is on file.
Pricing. You can choose to sell your images on a royalty-free or royalty basis. Choose from default price points—low, medium, high—or set up custom prices.
Ongoing. Since the process is easy, I set up a Photoshop action to save photos for submitting to Photoshelter and try to upload new images a couple of times a week. They allow you to submit up to 50 per day and 200 per month.
Research Calls. When they receive specific calls for images they can't fill with existing stock, they post the requests. This is a new service, so I was lucky to receive an enewsletter about it and checked it out. The first call on the list was for beach photos from Mexico. I had some! Responding to these calls excuses you from the usual submission procedure.
Personal Archive. You can set up a personal archive of images much like you can do on flickr.com. I have yet to fully investigate how to put this feature to good use. Let me know what you discover.
Submit your stuff today. Good luck!
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