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Is it worth selling photos on Shutterstock?

Absolutely. While you are a buyer, you can also see how your photographs are being used by other photographers. You can view your own photos on the Shutterstock Marketplace with your personal profile and contact information. You can also see photos that others have been sold by others in the marketplace to their clients, to photographers who may also like what they see, to a photo marketplace like Shutterstock that allows you to upload photos directly to your page with the ability to sell as well.

What types of users do you get along with?

My main clients on the Flickr marketplace are photographers and creative types. I have a wide range of people on the market and I enjoy seeing which photo I buy. It gives me a feeling of empowerment to buy more of the same image. You become a part of the community and you see a greater breadth of photographers.

How do I use Shutterstock?

Visit the marketplace. Search for your image. Click the plus sign next to the image title to add the photo to your favorites. Then click the plus sign next to your picture title to save it and add it to your profile with your email address. Then use the image search engine to find images near your interests. If you are looking for a specific piece of content and you don’t have the image, click the search term to find related images you might like.

When you are on the marketplace, people see that you are a photographer, but the most common question you get is: “Why don’t you sell your images?” The easiest answer is that Shutterstock is still trying to figure out how to make this market viable to all photographers, as it is a small operation so everyone needs a little help. The next most common question often is something like this: “How do I send a request to sell photographs I’ve purchased for a larger publication?” So, my best answer when I see a question like that is “don’t sweat it! I am a creative and photographers who sell images are not going to care. All they want is to be able to buy my photographs and you can find lots of photographers for that.”

You can read this great article on selling photos on Shutterstock that we wrote when they were first starting out:

Staying Connected in the Marketplace

There are a lot of great photo-sharing websites. Shutterstock is a good example of how to sell your images. On Flickr, you can upload images and then you can sell your images on Flickr and sell your other images on Flickr Marketplace. With