How to make money from your travel photos

There is no end of tips out there on the World Wide Web telling us that travelling the world doesn’t have to be super expensive, and that we can have great experiences on a shoestring budget. It’s all absolutely true – this age of budget flights and Airbnb has presented incredible opportunities to see the world, whatever you have, or haven’t, got in the bank.

But let’s be frank about it, the better your budget, the more opportunities you will have to treat yourself to a little luxury and extra fun while you are out and about. Making money through side-hustles to give the finances a boost is always a good idea, and one of the easiest ways of doing so is to monetize something that is already clogging up your phone’s memory.

*This is a collaborative post*

Everyone wants pictures

Times and fashions might change, but there is a constant demand for good quality pictures. From the traditional type that you see in frames and on canvases like this in people’s homes to the images on every web page on the net, all those pictures have to come from somewhere.

You might remember the pre-digital days, when photos were taken with a “point and click” – back then, if one or two good ones came out of the film, we counted ourselves lucky. Today, we take hundreds of snaps on digital cameras and, more commonly, on smartphones. The quality is generally far higher, as we can take several photos of the same thing and save only the very best.

How to sell your pictures

Unless you are an exceptionally talented photographer, don’t think you can give up the day job and make money selling pictures of your family on the beach, or the cat snoozing on the sofa. The easiest way to sell pics as a side hustle is via the pile ‘em high, sell ‘em cheap world of stock photography.

These are sites like Shutterstock or Dreamstock where you can register an account for free and upload your images for approval. The way it works is that when anyone pays to use your image, you will receive a cut of the proceeds. Alternatively, you could try using a site like Foap.Their model is very simple – the photos are listed at a set price, and the proceeds get split 50/50 between you and the platform.

Sites like these are a great way to get started, and if you find that you have a real talent for this, there is no reason to restrict it to travel photos.

Here’s the thing: The internet contains about 4.5 billion indexed pages, and they are distributed across approximately 1.8 billion websites. There are thousands more web pages added daily, and most of them have at least one, and often more images on them.

In short, there is an insatiable demand for pictures of every sort imaginable. If you like taking snaps using your smartphone, they could easily start earning you some very handy cash to splash on your next shoestring travel adventure!

Disclosure: this is a collaborative post.