My income report includes everything I receive from the EyeEm Market and the various EyeEm partnerships involved in their ‘Premium Collection’ such as EyeEm x Getty, EyeEm x Alamy and more. I’ll also share any lessons learned, the photos that sold and the exact US dollar amounts from each of my photo sales. So if you’d like to know ‘how much can I make on EyeEm?’ read on!
Hello and welcome back! It’s been another busy month for me – my girlfriend and I are finally approaching the end of our home buying process! We should have the keys to our new place very soon and when we do I’ll be looking forward to creating a productive office space where I can provide more content for you. Currently we are staying with family and although it’s been wonderful it just isn’t the right work environment to jump in and create some in depth content. All that should change soon though, so stay tuned!
Until that happens I’ve been working on setting up some interviews with EyeEm photographers in an attempt to share other people’s tips, tricks and stories. Many of you will have already read the first in the EyeEm Insider series where I interviewed myself. I know, I know, interviewing myself is a little odd but I wanted to lead by example. I hope my interview will encourage others to share their stories with us too.
https://www.oneeyeclosed.co.uk/eyeem-insider-interview-eyeem-award-finalist-brett-worth/
As much as I hope you enjoy reading my posts I think that it is really important to get different points of view from other members of the community and the EyeEm Insider interviews is my attempt to do this for you.
In the coming months I’ll be building out this site with much more content. Not only interesting articles and income reports but also useful, practical guides. There are some questions I’m seeing in our Facebook group time and time again so I’d like to dive into these in detail for you.
Finally, once we are in our new place I’ll be creating exclusive video content that you should find useful. I’ll do some live photo editing sessions whilst talking about the process and tools I use as well as thoughts on the images themselves. Things like:
- Is this image worth editing, is it useful to buyers or is it an image I like?
- How would I tag this image, why am I tagging it this way?
- Different workflows from shooting & editing on mobile only to Lightroom & desktop uploads… and everything in between!
- How to easily remove brand names and creative ways of avoiding the need for releases.
- More in-depth look at the other resources I use like Pro Retouch, RadLab or film emulator presets.
All this and more to come. It will take time but I want to offer as much value to this community as possible.
You can help out and be a part of this too. Join the conversations in our EyeEm Awesome Facebook group, leave comments on these posts and tell me what you’d like to see and if there are members of the EyeEm community who you’d like to see answer our EyeEm Insider questions be sure to point them this way.
Have You Uploaded Recently?
In other news: it’s been a while since I’ve uploaded to EyeEm. I’m still sat on a whole heap of images from my travels over the past few months and I’ll looking forward to getting them on there.
The break from uploading has been a good one though. I’ve been looking through my old EyeEm images and realising just how over-edited many of them are. One of the issues is that I actually like editing images in the EyeEm app on my iPhone. So, what’s the issue with that..? Well, you can’t zoom in when you’re editing on the iPhone! So while adding sharpness might look good on a small screen, when you get to see the image on a desktop it can look over-edited.
I still love to edit with the EyeEm app but il be being much more careful with my edits in the future.
Income Summary
-
Last month
101.15 -
This month
10.00 -
Total To Date
1,709.00
Images That Sold This Month
$ 2.00 Partner License (x2) – Getty Images via The Premium Collection
$ 2.00 Partner License – Getty Images via The Premium Collection
$ 2.00 Partner License – Getty Images via The Premium Collection
$ 2.00 Partner License – Getty Images via The Premium Collection
*New* Community Images That Sold This Month
As many of you who follow this blog may know I also run a private Facebook group where members of the EyeEm community get their questions answered. Facebook is great for this because it is much easier to have discussions about a whole range of topics. This month I asked our community to share some images that they too had sold…
Congrats to Arletta for this wonderful, warm shot. I can easily see why this image would sell and I expect it to keep selling in the future too. It’s timeless, well shot and well edited.
And congratulations to Paulien for selling these two images this month. I especially like the image of the flag; simple, bright and clean. I could see this being used as a blog image, as a book cover or being used in a magazine. Paulien is a great example of a sell curated EyeEm profile too, with bright images that appear to be shot with buyers in mind. Really wonderful.
It’s been a great change to invite community members to share their sales, perhaps it may become a regular feature. What do you think, would you like to see more image sales from our community each month?
Be sure to join our Facebook group to get your questions answered and submit your own images that sold next month.
Lessons Learned This Month
It’s been another light month of sales for me on EyeEm Market but I don’t mind. Just today I read a comment on another EyeEm Facebook group I am a part of (EyeEm Market Worldwide – be sure to check them out too), that read:
… I now view the Eyeem community more as the Market and so that affects how I use it… Sometimes I feel it’s a pity that personally I lost the community aspect in favour of the Market and chance to make sales…
And to that I say: that’s a real shame.
For me, the community is one of the greatest parts about EyeEm. Yes, the EyeEm Market is awesome but can you keep you a secret…?
The EyeEm Market isn’t the only stock library out there!
The truth is that there are many more stock libraries out there that you could join and submit your images to.
If money is ultimately your end goal then you should not be putting all of your eggs in one basket. The EyeEm Market is amazing but why stop there? Michael (one of the admins over at the EyeEm Market Worldwide Facebook group) uploads to several different agencies and reaps the rewards for doing so. Of course, talent and an eye for a good photo are obviously a huge part of his success, but uploading his images to several sites doesn’t hurt.
So why do I dedicate this site and my efforts only on the EyeEm Market? Quite simply, it’s because I love the mix of community, sales and ease of access. For me it will always be community first and that is why you will often see comically low income reports like this one. Then it’s a great, easy to use stock library where I can upload my images once and then they are distributed across other platforms for me.
Years ago when I first discovered stock agencies the thing that put me off was having to upload and tag images for each agency. I’d have to manually upload to Getty and Alamy and others, but with EyeEm I upload once and it’s all taken care of. It might not make me rich but it’s not going to eat up all of my time either, it’s a great trade off.
Back when I first joined EyeEm it was because I felt jaded with Instagram. Instagram was no longer the community of photo lovers that it once was, but EyeEm is still that for me. You only have to pick up a copy of the EyeEm magazine to see the incredible work coming out of the EyeEm community.
Some of us will find pride in earning a lot of money from our images, whereas others will find pride in winning missions, being featured photographers or arranging meet ups. Neither is better or worse than the other, it’s just different. What does EyeEm mean to you?
What I would say though is that using EyeEm just for sales is doing it – and yourself – a disservice. Give the community aspects of EyeEm a chance and I believe you will love it even more.
That’s all for now. Good luck and happy shooting!