As mentioned in my previous post, I’ve decided to try out a few side hustles, and see if any gain some traction, and result in some passive income (I’ll write about my goals and expectations in a future post). The first side hustle I’ve decided to try is to sell photos online via stock photos websites.
I’m an avid traveler and I usually take a lot of photos. I’ve been to many states in the US (in the last couple of years, I visited both East and West coasts with my wife, taking a 30 days’ vacation during the summer and driving around), Europe (I’ve been to Budapest a number of times, Paris just recently, London and Rome, just to name a few) and even India and Nepal (as part of my work travels). As a result, I have thousands of photos – most of them are of me being awkward with beautiful landscapes and backgrounds. But I think I’ve managed to capture a few nice scenes.
Preparing the photos
I’ve reviewed my photos collection – I have more than 20 thousand photos just from the last few years – and gathered around 100 photos that I believe may be useful to other people (mostly as stock photos, but who knows).
I’ve reviewed each photo, and enhanced it, to make it look as good as possible. Although many apps exist that can do wonders on photos, I’m not very good with these kind of things (I never really understood the point of filters in Instagram) – I just used the Photos app that comes built-in in Windows – that should be enough for my first batch of photos.
Uploading to Stock websites
I’ve decided to register to a few stock photos websites, upload the photos, and see how things go. I’ve started with the following websites:
Each site has a little different mechanism – some have built-in support for uploading a large number of images, while for others, I had to use FTP. I have a good internet connection, so uploading around 200MB of images didn’t take too long.
Metadata and submitting
Having to provide a title, keywords and categories for each photo in each site makes the process a bit painful. There appears to be some tools and websites that can do that for you, but I couldn’t find a free one that didn’t look fishy… (that might be an opportunity for a side project – create a simple tool to upload stock photos to multiple websites!)
In addition, the review process of some of those sites – I’m looking at you Shutterstock! – seems very unprofessional – I had multiple images being rejected with dumb-ass reasons…
At this point of time, I have uploaded most of my photos, but I still need to review each one, assign its metadata and submit it. I’ve started with Shutterstock, and will move on to the next site after I finish a full pass on the uploaded photos.