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I am looking for an online place to sell my photos. My requirements are slightly different to normal.

  1. Don't pay anything upfront. Only pay commission when a sale falls through.

  2. No filtering of images so if my images are rubbish I should still be able to have them for display to sell.

  3. Don't sell prints, only electronic format of high resolution images.

Basically I don't want to pay any fees unless I am making a sale/profit ;)

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    Welcome to the site and good luck with that search. I'm not aware of any such services and I've been writing about and covering the online photo sharing/hosting world for quite a while. – ahockley Jan 24 '11 at 15:40
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If your volume is low enough, you could just handle everything yourself. Post low-resolution images on your website and let users contact you directly specifying which ones they want. You could accept Paypal, which has much lower fees than many photo-selling websites I have seen.

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Have you considered a solution like Instaproofs? They don't have a setup fee, you can set your own prices, you can upload whatever you want to (it's designed as a professional photography proofing site), and they charge a commission only when a sale is actually made... The commission is kinda steep- 15% of the total order amount (although it is on a sliding scale, so if you hope to sell big-dollar amounts, the commission will end up being less). Sounds like it might be exactly what you're looking for.

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  • At that level of commission, I'm guessing they don't market your work... – Rowland Shaw Jan 24 '11 at 18:28
  • From the sound of it MMAMail already has demand from a target audience. Maybe he doesn't need marketing? We should ask him to clarify if this is important. – rm999 Jan 24 '11 at 18:33
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    Instaproofs target market is professional photographers who want to digitally proof their pictures to clients, so... No... They don't market your work. That'd be the professional photographers job. ;-) – Jay Lance Photography Jan 24 '11 at 18:40
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I'm pretty sure that Lulu.com will do what you are asking of them. It's not a particularly well know site for selling digitial prints, but it will do the job.

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    Let's take this from "pretty sure" to a simple "they will". And you get the side benefit of being able to sell coffee-table books of your collections on the same site with the same conditions: you create and upload, and if it sells, it sells and only if it sells does Lulu take a cut. Oh, and they worry about the payment gateway, not you. – user2719 Jan 25 '11 at 11:02
  • It's not very obvious how to do it on Lulu, could you give some hints or a link to sample gallery? All of the info in Lulu's "Publish" section seems to be targeted on selling physical items, such as a book. – Imre May 29 '11 at 8:17
  • @Imre: Upload a project type "Digital Files", then you can do what you need to. – PearsonArtPhoto May 29 '11 at 13:24
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I think Alamy will meet your needs; there is no fee to host your images, and as long as the images are sharp (in focus) and technically perfect (no blemishes, black borders etc, level horizon) and of sufficient resolution, they will take them.

They ask for an initial submission of 10-15 images which they will run through a QC check; if they all pass then you will be added to their contributors. There is no minimum submission requirement and they take 40% commission from all direct sales (more if its through related third parties).

Good luck!

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  • The thing is, I want to upload the whole bunch of photos taken to the web even if they are not perfect. So no quality checking filtering is important. People want to buy my photos but I have no way of selling them :( – anonymous Jan 24 '11 at 16:19
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    In that case I think you're asking rather a lot; an agency such as Alamy has a reputation to maintain that all its photos are flawless. They make no aesthetic judgments on submitted photographs, just technical perfection. Why don't you want to spend a few minutes to remove blemishes if it will increase your chances of a sale? In what way are your photos 'not perfect'? – NickM Jan 24 '11 at 16:22
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No Screening:

http://500px.com allows you to sell either a Canvas or a 1920*1080 pixels image.

http://www.artflakes.com/ allows selling of printed photographs only

http://www.deviantart.com/ allows selling of printed photographs

http://www.fotocommunity.de/ allows selling of images if you have a subscription (don't think they are filtered - not sure if prints or downloads)

Filtered:

http://www.whitewall.com/ still has the Art market. (Prints only)

Own Website:

http://fotomoto.com might be an idea. (Prints or download)

These are all that spring to mind...

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