r/stockphotography

Hi everyone,

I’ve been selling stock photography on Alamy for a while, and I recently noticed something that honestly surprised me.

I’ve made several sales on Alamy, totaling around $190 USD, but after commissions/charges, only about $41 USD of that has gone to my balance. My account currently shows an 80% commission for Alamy / 20% for the contributor.

My cleared balance has also been sitting around $49 USD for more than six months, and because it hasn’t reached the payment threshold, I still haven’t received a payout. I recently made three additional sales, but the majority of that money is still not cleared.

I understand that Alamy needs to take a percentage, and I’m aware that commission rates can depend on contributor levels and other factors. But 80% feels extremely high, especially compared with other stock agencies.

So I’d really like to hear from other contributors:

• Have you experienced the same 80/20 commission split?
• How long does it usually take you to reach the payment threshold?
• Do you still consider Alamy worthwhile in 2026?
• Have your earnings on Alamy improved over time?
• Are there ways to move into a better commission tier?
• Do you think the current commission structure is fair for contributors?

I’m not necessarily trying to criticize Alamy. I’m genuinely trying to figure out whether it makes sense to continue investing time in uploading and maintaining a portfolio there.

For those who have been selling on Alamy for several years: would you continue uploading there, or would you focus your efforts on other agencies?

Thanks!

When the first part was ready, some things grabbed my attention, and I dug deeper. As I promised in the original thread, this is the second part - and it is much less optimistic.

I'm an exclusive iStock/Getty contributor, so the report is a bit overly focused on Getty but I believe this is an universal trend.

Part 1 is here: https://www.reddit.com/r/stockphotography/s/zlsGLwBm2Q
The document is here: When Photography Becomes Raw Material

Sharing this because I keep seeing sellers budget for inventory and ads and then get blindsided by visual content.

What a catalogue shoot actually costs

Photographer, one day: Rs 15,000-40,000 Model, one day, non-agency: Rs 8,000-25,000 (double it for an agency face) Studio, stylist, retouching on top Basic per-photo rates from studios: Rs 300-800 A full marketplace-compliant batch: Rs 5,000-20,000

The trap is that it is not a one-time cost. Every new drop resets it.

The spec table nobody tells you about

This is the part that actually costs people money silently. There is no such thing as shoot once, list everywhere:

Amazon: 1:1, 1600px+ for zoom, pure #FFFFFF, product filling ~85% of frame Myntra: 3:4 portrait, 1500x2000, gender-matched real model mandatory Flipkart: 1:1, 1000px+, model shots strongly favoured Meesho: 4:5 at 1080x1350 Nykaa and Ajio each have their own QC bar again

So the same shoot has to be re-cropped, re-edited or re-shot per channel. And if you upload something non-compliant, Amazon can suppress the listing out of search without notifying you. You find out when orders stop and you go hunting for an ads problem that was never there.

What I would actually do at small scale

Shoot the 3-4 hero images you genuinely care about properly. Fit, drape and texture on your best SKU is worth a real camera. Generate the long tail. Angle variants, on-model shots for SKUs that will never justify a shoot, marketplace crops, ad ratios. Fix format before you blame ads. Half the "my listing is dead" posts I read turn out to be an image compliance issue.

Disclosure since it is relevant: I build socialshot.ai, which does step 2 (one product photo in, on-model images out, auto-formatted per marketplace, roughly Rs 11 per image). The cost and spec numbers above are all public though, and worth checking against whatever quote you are currently sitting on.

Curious what people here are actually paying per usable image right now, and whether anyone has had a listing suppressed purely on image spec.

I’ve been selling on adobe for over 8 years and just had the weirdest thing happen. My sales have been going through the roof lately, especially as I’ve been working on my strategy more. I had some crazy big sales the past month, 2 days where I got a crazy amount of video sales (normally on a single topic at a time) over $300 per day, one was over $500. Then I hit another $100+ day and boom deactivated. It took them a week to reinstate my account, but I missed a $580 payout, and my account balance had another $300ish removed from it. They said it was activated due to “unusual activity” but I was under the impression my account was just hitting some big growth due to my growing portfolio and strategy. I wrote them multiple times and I just get generic copy pastas back. Anyone else had tons of money removed from the account? Did you get it back and how?

Hey everyone!

I’m a student and a microstock contributor.A while ago, I wrote a simple script for myself just to auto-generate tags using AI. It saved me so much time that I ended up turning it into a full Chrome extension and web app called ExifGarden.

My app writes the tags directly into the EXIF data of your image. You do it ONCE, and when you upload to multiple agencies, they all read the tags automatically.

It's free to try. I’d love to get some feedback from real contributors to see if the AI tags fit your workflow!

Link: https://exifgarden.com/

Let me know what you think!

My dad’s a professional stock photographer — he’s been shooting and selling through Shutterstock, Adobe Stock, iStock, Depositphotos and a few other platforms for years. Turns out the actual photography was never the bottleneck. The bottleneck was keywording: every single photo needs a title, a description, and 30-50 accurate keywords before it’s even worth submitting. Multiply that by a few hundred photos a month, across multiple platforms with slightly different rules, and you’ve got a part-time job just typing.

So I built him a tool: point it at a folder, it analyzes every photo (and video) and writes the metadata straight into the file, no copy-pasting. His submission software just picks it up automatically. It also handles editorial vs commercial formatting on its own.

A few other stockers he knows tried it and asked where to get it, so I’m slowly opening it up. Shoot stock and this sounds familiar? Happy to answer questions.

Hello community.
I'm a stock photographer on my own, iStock/Getty exclusive since 2007 (and for the last 10 years, it has been my only income). And I've been into photography for a much, much longer time.

But today I want to invite you to test my app, which is not intended exclusively for STOCK photography - but for any photo or video workflow.

I created it initially for myself — and it came out so good that I decided to make it public and commercial.

It does only one thing, but it does it properly: it ingests media cards (or existing messy archives) and makes order out of chaos.

Sounds trivial — it is not. You may say "Lightroom does it for free," or "why not Photo Mechanic," or "come on, we have OffShoot." And you'd be right... and wrong.

I created this app because when I needed it, I found NOTHING that did what I needed. I'm a Windows person; I've used Breeze's Downloader for decades — can't say I'm very happy with it, but it's good, flexible enough, and it works (for Windows, I still recommend it without hesitation). On Mac, nothing with that kind of flexibility exists. The importers built into Lightroom, Capture One, and the other RAW processors are a joke; the established ingest apps are too rigid — and at their prices, simply not viable. So I did what I did.

Welcome to test ShotPorter. It's at the pre-launch stage — you can't purchase it yet, but it's fully functional and ready for real work. All details are on the site, so I will not repeat them here.

Free trial: 30 days, no limitations, no credit card — just an email. And I'll grant a full license for bug reports with logs and/or screenshots. I'm confident it has fewer bugs than any Adobe product 

The prototype has been in my everyday workflow for about a year now and has proved safe and reliable. And it is a HUGE time saver. Believe me :)

ShotPorter - and join Discord