Free images, on the face of it, appear to be a great deal for photo buyers users and a kick in the teeth for working stock photographers. Or is there a way free could actually work for photographers seeking to make money from their images?

Making a reasonable return from stock photography in the current open and competitive market requires creativity not only in producing images but also in their marketing. Photographers, increasingly under pricing and demand pressures, need to be prepared to approach new ideas with an open mind and do a little out of the box thinking.

Now the business of free isn’t new. This 2008 Wired magazine pieceis well worth a read if you’ve not come across it before. Of course the microstock agencies are well known for having free offerings in some form. Some do offer small cash incentives to contributors to offer images for free but the primary selling point is the idea your individual portfolio will gain extra exposure and hopefully increased sales. Just as the agencies offer free images to attract buyers to their sites individual photographers can tap into the traffic directly by making a few images available for free. Or so the theory goes.

I haven’t personally tested this out having only ever made one microstock image available for free. On a whim I allowed this photo of a bunch of a grapes to migrate to Dreamstime’s free section when presented with the option. At the time I thought why not give it a go with this relatively mundane but useful image. Needless to say I’ve seen no discernable benefit but that is due to my poor approach to the potential opportunity. If you’re interested in experimenting with a few free images on microstock here are the basic errors I made so you can avoid them!

Firstly, avoid the natural tendancy to pick your less good work to offer for free. As I freely admitted my grapes photo is nothing special; it is not going to attract a lot of attention which is after all the whole point of taking the step of offering a freebie. Duh! Marketing 101 failed. I’m not alone though; if you browse the Dreamstime Free Imagessection you’ll see a lot of mundane, and some quite poor, work. It is only natural photographers want $$$ signs attached to their good stuff. However this is missing the point of offering a free image. You want it to be good or better to attract attention and drive that traffic to the rest of your portfolio. The fact that much of the free imagery offered by the microstocks is poor is an opportunity for good work to stand out from the crowd.

Secondly make sure you have plenty of similar and related work of an equally good or better standard in your portfolio. The idea here is that some of the traffic attracted to your free image may well be tempted to part with cash for some of your other photos so make sure they see images they’re likely to be interested in and tempted by. If you click on the grapes you’ll see the Dreamstime download page for the image (help yourself, it’s free!) with two smaller images to the right. These shots automatically pulled from my portfolio on Dreamstime as related images. So you can see Dreamstime make a generous space available to showcase more of your work, I just haven’t chosen the right shot to utilise it! Offer a freebie from a series or subject area you have strong coverage on and this page would show another twenty of your images available to buy. I can see how this could work with a more thoughtful approach.

While the microstocks all take a slightly different approach to offering free images, from Crestock’s daily feed to Dreamstime’s large collection, they all follow the same model of a small number of images as free high resolution downloads to attract traffic and hopefully buyers to the much larger collections for sale. There is an alternative method; offer everything for free but at a limited size. The reasoning here is fairly obvious; give away versions of limited use to attract the all important traffic and rely on enough of that traffic being willing to stump up a small payment to upgrade to a larger version of images. Given the increasing market for small images for use in digital media in all its guises I personally see a potential flaw in this plan in that many users will now be perfectly content with very small images. The market for photos for online use on websites and blogs, mobile applications, epublishing etc etc is fast growing. Many of these users will only ever need a small image. The question then becomes is there still a large enough volume of users that will want to take up a paid upgrade option?

Freedigitalphotos.net is a site that is essentially a microstock agency with this twist of the freebie offering. Every image on the site is available as a free download but limited to 400px on the longest side. Even given that tiny size it will inevitably deter many potential contributors and the site is undoubtedly tiny compared to regular microstocks. There is an ‘upside’ in that contributors can set their own price for full resolution downloads, though given the value nature of the site there isn’t going to be much logic in pricing anything beyond the upper end of microstock pricing. So does it work for contributors? I’ve no experience myself as a contributor but there is an interesting case study on the site of contributing photographer Simon Howden. Again I think this model has potential with a planned approach; the images offered need to appeal to potential larger uses while minimising uploads that lend themselves mainly to online and digital usage.

It is, of course, possible to do something along these lines independently. I’ve used a combination of Clustershot and Freeimageslive to experiment with offering limited size freebies in the hope of generating sales for larger versions of the images. Now my experimental sample isn’t significant enough to draw any strong conclusions and Clustershot have been going through some upheavals too, so the potential is really unproven. However it is interesting that my one and only sale through Clustershot to date is this image which is one of four I’ve made available here on Freeimageslive. It could of course be coincidence but once again if you’re prepared to embrace ‘free’ in some form I think there is potential to generate a return creatively. It is also worth noting the amount of backlinks the Freeimageslive page allows me to have on the image download page. Not only do I link to the image on my Clustershot page but also to some of my microstock portfolios, my Alamy collection and even this blog. Those links on a relevant and reasonably well optomised page are difficult to value but may well be worth the give away in themselves.

So there you have it, some food for thought if you’re willing to bend your head around the idea of giving (to a limited degree) some of your work away. If you’ve had a go or think I’m mad let me know in the comments. Stay tuned for a quick part 2 on more ways to make money from free photos!