Ok, we added a forum. We get a lot of questions sent in and decided it would be best to start a community forum to allow visitors to post questions and get advise from us and others in the microstock industry.

Click on Microstock Forum in the navigation bar to get started. Please read the rules and guidelines sticky post to get the basics before you start. See you there.

Shutterstock, the world’s largest stock subscription site, has reached 10 million stock photos online for sale.

When I checked the site today, it read:
10,004,906 royalty-free stock photos
104,906 new stock photos added this week
215,103 photographers

Wow, that’s a lot of images and an awesome selection for photo buyers.

Are your photos in their collection? Visit our Sell Your Photos section to learn how to sell your images and video footage online.

It’s very sad to announce that StockXpert is closing this month. Getty Images, who owns StockXpert now after the Jupiterimages purchase, has decided to shut the site down.

Getty is directing StockXpert buyers to iStockPhoto. This is good for Getty, but what about StockXpert’s artists? I am more of a Shutterstock or Dreamstime fan myself.

StockXpert was liked by most contributors for its caring administration and 50% royalty rate to its artists. Now the site’s contributors are being sent to apply at iStock where, unless they go exclusive and only sell through iStock, will only get 20% of the sale. A 20% royalty rate is pretty much rock bottom in the industry.

iStock does sell a lot of images though; and for much higher prices. It makes the 20% easier to swallow.

StockXpert was closed, but Thinkstock is opening. My post about that is here.

Getty Images recently announced a new stock photo site offering images by subscription. Many believe ThinkStockPhotos.com was created to compete with the market leading subscription site Shutterstock.

Although image buyers may like the new subscription site and price range, it seems many contributors are not so happy. With the opening of ThinkStockPhotos.com comes the closing of StockXpert.com. StockXpert was a fairly well performing site for contributors and had a nice following of buyers. StockXpert was acquired by Getty Images in their purchase of Jupiterimages.

ThinkStockPhotos is also cutting the royalty rate to the artists for their image sales. Shutterstock is paying their contributing artists up to 50% more than what has been announced for ThinkStockPhotos. This puts ThinkStockPhotos at the bottom of the industry for subscription royalty rates.

Only time will tell how this all plays out. There is an uproar in the non-exclusive microstock contributor community. It will all be watched closely. You can make your comments below.

Just a quick post to let everyone know about the new affiliate program at DepositPhotos. Along with the new ability to get referral income, they also PAY YOU to upload your files.

If you have not already checked them out, register with the site and upload your test images. Once you are approved, you can join the Photographer Promotion Program (P.P.P.) and get paid to upload your images.

Well the new site was created and moved to MicrostockPhotography.com yesterday. I like the new look; its simple and informative. What do you think? I plan on adding a lot more content soon.

The old site ran on DotNetNuke, which is a great CMS, but its a little heavy. Also the site directory script was really buggy. Wordpress has done good for me on other sites, so I converted the site to that.

Let me know what you think.

Hello.  Welcome to the Microstock Photography website.  We have moved our site over to wordpress and refaced the whole site.  In the coming days you will see a lot of content moved from the old site.  Check back often, or better yet bookmark the site, to keep up with all the new information added.  If you have a web site, check out the Microstock Photography Directory and add it.