Buying Royalty-Free Images

When you see an image for sale. You are buying the image with the right to use the image without having to pay any additional royalty fees in the future. This means you can use it for your website, for your brochure, for your business cards and so on. You cannot give the image for another person to use. You cannot re-sell the image. You cannot place it in a template and re-sell it.

The risks in using royalty-free images illegally can put your business in jeopardy. There are many large royalty-free microstock websites that have entire departments of legal teams that spend there day looking to file lawsuits against individuals and businesses who use royalty-free images illegally.

I think educating the online community is the best way to minimize the confusion created by the term "royalty-FREE" and explain to people that images are not for FREE but are free from additional royalty costs to the buyer.

Microstock Companies for Photography and Illustrations

There are many websites that can sell your images. The current top sites are Shutterstock with a huge base of subscribers and a high royalty earner for many artists. The next is Dreamstime which offers increased royalty earnings on specific images the more they download. Fotolia is the next highest earning site with a fast approval rate for vectors and a great interface for submitting images.

The most important thing to learn is how to use meta tags to embed keywords in your files. This makes submitting your work to many sites much simpler than keywording the same images over and over again. Each microstock site will read your meta tags automatically and you just select a category and submit.

Good luck in your microstock adventure!