Day 2

You’ve heard about people who are selling their photos and getting paid? Me too, so I decided to try it on myself.

That’s how I end up on shutterstock.com. This site could help you to sell your photos. It has 3,677,912 royalty-free stock photos and 101,811 photographers, seems pretty encouraging.

My first mistake was that I registered on the main page but it is only for buyers. Sellers should register on submit.shutterstock.com. It says here that “You can earn $500 (US) per month!” Not too bad for a few photos I guess. Actually I’m not a professional photographer, but of course I have a several great photos, which I’m really proud of.

So I registered once again. But this time it wasn’t so easy. After filling all the forms, they asked me to send my id with the photo. Explanation is easy. Shutterstock wants to be sure that photos you are selling actually yours, not something you just downloaded a few minutes ago.

I scanned and send them my id. I was waiting for their reply almost a day and when I finally got it, I was ready to start making some money online. The terms are easy, as a newcomer you need to send 10 your best photos and the minimum size of uploaded image is 4 MP.

After a half an hour of making my top 10, I downloaded my best photos. Another 30 minutes I killed for writing description and tag words, but I finally I did everything they asked me to. I hoped to see my photos on the site, but I learned that shutterstock need to approve my photos first. So I have to wait one more day and when I felt the smell of online money I finally got the results and they weren’t pretty.

6 of my 10 photos weren’t approved. They wrote about some problems with colors and white balance. I thought about getting my photos to a friend, who works as a professional photographer, but the funnies thing was that shutterstock banned my account for a month. They do this if more than 3 of your photos haven’t been approved. Yes, that’s only my fault that I didn’t take it seriously, I didn’t work on my photos in photoshop but still I would like to ask shutterstock two questions "one month, really?" and "why didn’t you mention this before?"

So, if you think that you can easily earn some money from your photos, you're wrong. If you not take it seriously, your photos won’t be approved and even if they do, you won’t sell them anyway. So if photography is your hobby and you know Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator better than yourself, you should give it a try, if not, it’s a lot of ways of making money online and I’ll try them all, I’m sure you’ll find something.