Signing up with a Stock Photography Company

If you are a photographer and would like to sell some of your images with a stock photography company, here is what you can expect:

All stock photography libraries will ask you to sign a contract when you first join with them which sets out the terms of conditions of becoming a contributor. The level of commitment you will be expected to give varies from company to company, however it's much stricter now than it was a decade or so ago. Back then, it was very common for stock photographers to overshoot everything then place the same stock photos with many different stock photography libraries to maximize sales. Stock photography libraries didn't like this practice, but they accepted that it went on. Things have changed however. The stock image industry is much bigger than it was before, and stock photography libraries now require in written contracts that their photographers do not put the same pictures (or even similar pictures from the same shoot) with other stock photography libraries.

The reason for this is that stock photography libraries don't want rival stock photography companies to end-up with the same picture, and have stock images being used in the same way in the same year. Some bigger stock photography libraries often demand that their photographers do not put any work with other stock photography libraries or sell use of their work directly to clients.

When you submit work to a stock photography library it should be captioned accurately in a style accepted by the stock photography company. The stock photography library could face embarrassment if it sold a stock image containing the wrong information on it. For landscape and travel shots, it helps to keep notes of locations and mark maps so you know exactly where everything was shot. When a search is being carried out for a client by the stock photography library, or clients are doing their own search on-line, they may use any number of keywords to try and find suitable pictures or stock photos. For that reason, it's important that your captions contain different potential keywords. The more keywords you put into a caption on your stock image the greater the chance of it being sourced.

Some stock photography libraries prefer to re-mount images. If yours does, submit the pictures in strips of un-mounted film with caption notes on the sleeves. The library can then cut out the frames they want and return the rest.

If the library prefers you to mount your own then do so. Use self-adhesive card mounts, as they're cheaper than plastic, and follow any instructions for captioning. Usually the top strip must be left for the library's stamp, while the bottom strip can be used for the caption. Hand-written captions are fine if you have neat writing, but a much better method is to type out the captions with a computer and print them out on small labels which you can then stick on the mounts.