I receive regular requests from photographers who want to know how they can license rights to the images they have created over the years on film. Here’s what I tell them. Licensing rights to images is very difficult in today’s market because there is such an oversupply available compared to the demand.

More and more people are producing pictures of a quality sufficient to satisfy the needs of many who want to use pictures. Thanks to the Internet -- and to a great extent microstock -- it is much easier than in the past for those who would like to earn a little money from the images they have produced to make contact with customers who might want to use them.

Looking for some vacation reading material? Here are some suggestions. If you want to know how successful stock photographers do it, here are links to a series of interviews done over the last couple years. There are lots of different strategies. Some of these photographers are among the world’s most successful. Other’s like Todd Klassy and Holger Mette are relatively new to the business, and have adopted unconventional strategies that may be the wave of the future.

We received 251 individual responses to the online survey, posted in May, that was designed to measure photographer income trends. 81% of the respondents were from the U.S. and Canada. Almost 6% were from the United Kingdom. No other country had more than 5 respondents. For 133 of the 251, revenue was down more than 5% in 2009 than in 2008 (probably in most cases a lot more than 5%).  For 56, revenue was in the plus or minus 5% range and for the remaining 62 revenue was up more than 5%.  Forty-one of the 62 were in the early stages of their careers (1 to 4 years) when revenue can be expected to grow.

This story provides links to a series of articles that include the results of a photographer income survey, analysis of the sales of microstock photographers, the size of the market for stock photography and other data useful to understanding stock photo industry trends.

There are a number of stories on this site that will aid you in determining what to charge for a stock photo usage. Below is a list of story titles and the number of credits required to read the entire story. Click on the detailed description link and it will take you to a short description of what is included in the full story. Click on the Story link and it will take you directly to the story and deduct the appropriate number of credits from your account.

This story provides a list of useful articles that will provide the reader with a good background on the current state of the stock photography business and where it is headed.

If you license rights to your photos for textbook use then here are a few articles you should read.

For several years I have estimated that the size of worldwide market for still stock images and illustrations at about $1.8 billion. I’ve also claimed that overall stock photography has been a no-growth business despite the fact that some companies and individuals could point to growth. Now, at the end of 2009 I believe gross revenue for the industry is no more than $1.45 billion and it will probably continue to decline. The stories here break out various segments of the market and explain the overall trends.l

This story provides links to a five part series of articles designed to help photographers understand the major trends impacting the industry in 2010 and help them plan for the future. We outline some of the issues to consider, new business models to explore and things to focus on in order to have a profitable business. Following the first five stories are links to some additional articles on the business of stock photography that may be of interest.

This story provides links to some of the stories on this site that may be of interest to someone new to the stock photography business, or someone who might to have a brief refresher course on some of the things that have been happening in the last few years. Many of these stories will also give you some idea of developing trends and what the future might hold.

This is a list of 14 articles that will provide microstock photographers, or those considering contributing to microstock sites, some useful background and insights into the industry.

Twenty questions to test your knowledge of the photo licensing industry and its future potential.

This article by Ellen Boughn raises the question of whether there is a need for specialized niche microstock collections, argues the case for them and points to Vivozoom and Microstock Israel as indications that we may see more of them. Jim Pickerell presents counter arguments as to why the success of such sites is unlikely.

In January we published an analysis of the units licensed in 2009 by a group of iStockphoto’s most successful contributors and asked the question “Has Microstock Reached a Plateau?” The first quarter 2010 results seem to confirm this is the case. As a baseline, on June 1, 2009 we did a count of the total number of images licensed in May 2009 by a group of 196 out of the 250 top selling iStock contributors. (Information on some of the top 250 was not available.) There were 442,533 images licensed by this group in that month. Average monthly sales were up only 5% by the end of 2009, but they were down 1% to only 3.9% by the end of March 2010. See the full analysis and the implications for the future.

Katy von Brandenfels, of BigCheesePhoto won €100 our May/June PhotoLicensingOptions’ contest designed to encourage those interested in the business of producing and licensing rights to images to sign up for this FREE weekly email every Saturday.

With all the free information available on the Internet why would or should anyone want to pay for information? Many consumers believe that writers should give away their work in order to build a following of customers who will then pay them for some other product or service they provide. Most would acknowledge that some effort and expense is required on the part of the creator to produce good, useful information, but often that is not deemed to be of any economic value. Photographers tend to supply information on their blogs as a way of getting customers to hire them for assignment work, for paid speaking engagements or as a way of selling a book. The other way to earn revenue is to generate enough traffic to your site that advertisers will pay to surround your information with ads in hopes that some or your popularity will rub off on them. Is giving away information the only way?

The following is a list of general categories of imagery that are often used by educational publishers. This list is used by the Universal Images Groups and by Encyclopaedia Britannica in categorizing images for their purposes. In one sense the list might be viewed as covering all types of imagery, but if you think of each category in terms of images that might have an educational application you see that many images that might broadly fit into the category will have little or no education value.