Wahoo, made my first sale on Getty Images!

As I mentioned this summer, I’ve been invited to license some of my pictures as stock photography with Getty Images. I was really excited to get the invitation, but it’s been a very s-l-o-w process just to get the invited pictures up on the Getty site and ready for sale.

First, an image has to be invited. You can suggest some images for invitation, but Getty seems to be fairly choosy. Once they issue an invitation, the images go through a review process, which takes a week or two, and then it takes another six weeks or so for the images to have keywords added to them. (Without the keywords, there’s no way for a buyer to find your image, let alone license it.) So really, although I was invited to join in late July, you couldn’t actually find any of my images in the Getty database until mid-September or so. The statements are issued late in the month for the previous month, so the first month I could have possibly seen any sales would have been last month — and there were none.

In the interim, I’ve had a bunch of images invited. In fact, I currently have 85 images either available for license, in review, or waiting for keywords. Here’s the full set of what’s available today (and I’m pretty sure I have another dozen or so pending.)

(They’re in the order they were invited, more or less, so the ones near the bottom haven’t yet been processed or had their keywords added. The first 40ish or so are read to go, though!)

So anyway, I’ve invested hours of time thus far. What seemed to be an easy way to make some pocket cash has turn into a bit of an obsession, what with the submitting images for review, and preparing the selected ones, and hearing the success stories of other Getty contributors. (There’s a thread on the Getty Images contributor forum that talks about book covers, and I read it with a fierce sort of covetousness. How awesome would that be, to have one of your pictures turned into a book cover?!?)

Well, I doubt it will be a book cover, but I found out this week that I made my first official sale through Getty last month. Someone in the USA licensed this picture, one of the handful of pictures that were included in my initial invitation to join Getty Images:

Heh, pretty good one, eh? It still makes me chuckle, and now even moreso! I have no idea for what purpose it will be used, and will likely never find out. But I’m tickled that it’s out there somewhere, and someone paid $120 to license it!

My cut is $24, which goes a good way to covering the shelter fee we forked out to adopt the tabby-striped menace in the first place! 🙂

Author: DaniGirl

Canadian. storyteller, photographer, mom to 3. Professional dilettante. View all posts by DaniGirl