A Picture's Worth a Thousand Dollars, One Stock Download at a Time

» My Dreamstime Portfolio

If I were going to go exclusive with any of the microstock sites, I'd likely go with Dreamstime. They've accepted the most of my photos, they've sold the most of my photos, and they seem to have a robust system of buying and selling. They aren't trying to hack the photo market to pieces, they have high-quality images, and they have a decent blog system (that I do not use) as well with every account (you can learn a great deal from the dreamstime folks and the microstock business just by reading the blogs over there).

Here are a few of the nitty-gritty details to help you decide if Dreamstime is right for you:

Exclusive photographer program? / Yes
Offer exclusives by image? / Yes
Affiliate program? / Yes

» My BigStockPhoto Portfolio

The upload and tagging system seems a bit clunky to me, but bigstockphoto seems to get a good lot of activity, and I started getting a few sales before I figured I even had enough photos available for anybody to notice. So that's a good sign. I think. Still, I've put a number of photos up there that I've yet to complete the tagging process on, just because it seems like half a step more of a hassle than the other sites.

Half a step? Sheesh. I should get busy.

» My iStockPhoto Portfolio

They were the first, and sort of invented the genre of "microstock," and though there's a bit of an iStockPhoto backlash (especially now they are owned by Getty Images), they are still one of the strongest agencies out there, and it wouldn't make sense not to mention them.

They have tough, often strange, standards (for me), but I have a feeling if you're an "exclusive" photographer (someone who promised not to be represented anywhere else) you can do a lot better with them. But I'm not willing to hand over the keys to my creativity quite so easily. (And, of course, they might not even accept me as exclusive... I get a lot of rejections from them on images that are accepted handily elsewhere. I don't think it's a quality issue so much as a style issue.)