I’ve been debating the prospect of selling photographic prints on my website. One of the defining principles of photography is not to get wrapped up in making money. But, at the same time, why would you want to limit yourself with the prospect of making a quick dollar?
I sold photographic prints on my website before. Not once did I ever get an offer. I thought I’d use a third party application and website called FotoMoto. The site uses Adobe Flash to integrate with a gallery slideshow. If a potential buyer is interested in what they see, they click on the print, are directed to FotoMoto’s website — and then buy it. All the distribution and printing is taken care of, while collecting a small fee of course.
This proved troublesome. Most people don’t browse photographs on their desktop, but instead on their mobile phones. About 90 percent of the time, my galleries would crash on a person’s mobile phone. I started receiving complaints from friends and family who couldn’t browse my work because of the third party application I installed on my website.
Would you pay for me?
THE ISSUE:
1) In order to sell photographs through a third-party vendor, they need to be possess a certain resolution. Higher resolution photographs often create larger file sizes. For my Nikon D810, a 36 megapixel camera, these file sizes are often HUGE. This is my potential clients browsing my site would crash. A gallery of images would be somewhere between 300-400 megabytes of data.
2) While I could lower the file sizes, the prints would come out pixelated. Although this would solve the browsing issue, there is no way that I can guarantee a good print. I decided FotoMoto was not for me and decided that the amount I make through photographic prints is not really worth it.
THE (POTENTIAL?) SOLUTION:
1) Now, since I’ve revamped my entire website, this opens the door for selling photographic prints once again.
2) I’ve browsed the NUMEROUS online tutorials that talk about selling photographs online. Some claim they make thousands, while others claim that it just isn’t worth the time. This presents two schools of thought. Am I willing to devote all of my time to selling a business purely on prints? Or Am I focused on selling my photography through things like YouTube? This, yet again, depends on a number of circumstances. I want to monetize most of my work eventually through YouTube, but I feel that the energy devoted to prints could be wasteful?
3) I think that what I will do is explore the aspect of selling certain prints online, and eventually it might make me a few dollars. I think devoting a few days a week to upgrading my social media and websites will help create more traffic to this website.
As I throw my chips into selling photography prints, it would help if I didn’t exactly lose over 7,000 images I took over the course of two years.
I used a Seagate Backup Plus 2 Terabyte hard-drive that I brought everywhere with me. It still contains these images but whenever I plug it in to access the files, it just spins and spins. A beeping sound can be heard as it tries so hard to do its duty, alas poor little hard-drive it seems your days are numbered.
I was able to backup a good portion of them on my Dropbox account. Unfortunately, I never backed up the newer images before it decided to fall victim to gravity. At least now it’s a good motivator to get out shooting again.
