Online sales of usage licenses and prints: a checklist

Galleries organized by subject in categories and subcategories

Instead of dumping all your photos and videos into a single gallery and make them only accessible through search, make sure that your files are organized in categories and subcategories as “folders”. This will help ensure that:

• prospective buyers are offered a good experience that allows them to browse through your content by subject in a natural way, and easily see related images or videos. Keep in mind that new buyers might not yet know the extent of your library and what to search for, so category-based browsing is important.
• Google and other search engines better understand what your photos are about, so they are more likely to appear in search results.

Large stock photo agencies have curated collections, and so should you. But unlike them, you can organize and structure your whole library, so use that to your advantage!

In PhotoDeck, any file can be published in multiple galleries/sub-galleries without needing to reupload, making it a breeze to curate your collection.

When creating your gallery structure, also make sure to create a gallery tree for private, protected client galleries. These shouldn’t be directly visible on your website, but your full structure should be easy to manage and update down the road.

Similarly, you might need at some point to create special galleries, like a featured portfolio. Therefore, the top-level galleries might be for example “Categories“, “Portfolio“, “Client galleries”, with the “Stock categories“ gallery set as the website’s front page:

• Stock categories (front page)
  • Category 1
    • Sub-category 1
    • Sub-category 2
    • …
  • Category 2
  • …
• Clients (hidden)
  • Client 1
  • Client 2
  • …
• Features
• Portfolio
• …

All files tagged and captioned for an effective search

While organizing images and videos in categories and subcategories is beneficial, it does not replace a good search function. And for search to work, all files must be properly tagged with keywords and captions.

Image keywording is an art in itself. Tip: create your own checklist of the kind of keywords every file in your collection should have.

Artificial Intelligence can also be of great help, especially when using advanced engines that are able to be directed by instructions to focus their keyword generation on specific aspects. For example, PhotoDeck is integrated with OpenAI ChatGPT, which is able to generate domain-specific, relevant keywords.

High resolution files available

Your clients should be able to order, license and immediately download files, in high resolution or in the size they have licensed.

It is therefore important that your platform hosts your original high-quality, high-resolution photos and footage (and that it is able to automatically resize them for delivery if needed).

Uploading your high-res files also acts as a backup for yourself, and allows you to access them easily from any location.

PhotoDeck is integrated with Lightroom and Photo Mechanic, making it easy to integrate gallery creation and uploading in your workflow.

Beautiful AND functional presentation

Your website must look modern, clean and present the images/videos in an appealing manner. It should:

• look professional and representative of your brand, without drawing attention to itself and overwhelming the images: you want people to focus on the images, not on the website design;
• be very easy and fast to navigate and to use -- that is crucial. Usability trumps beauty and special effects.

For a site mainly dedicated to selling stock photography usage rights and prints, it means that while you should always strive to display large-size images, important information like captions and keywords must also be immediately visible, and that the buttons to purchase as well as the search must be prominent.

For galleries (categories) pages and search results, the thumbnails should be big enough to be legible, but not as big as to hinder a good overview of all images, the objective being to help a clients choose among them.

SEO tactics in place

Getting a website ranking well in Google and other search engines has much more to do with its content and links from other websites than technical aspects. Generally speaking, good SEO starts with providing your visitors with useful content and a good online experience.

Here are important technical “tactics” to consider:

• Good internal links: make sure your main galleries are easily browsable, with clear navigation down to individual images and across sub-galleries. If you have followed our recommendation to organize your galleries / folders by subject in categories and subcategories, this should be in place already.
• Make sure images are captioned (also useful for internal search).
• On individual gallery pages, add text relevant to the subject.
• Make sure correct Heading tags (H1, H2…) are used throughout your website, including on individual images. Also use the ALT tag on individual images. (In PhotoDeck, this is taken care of automatically based on gallery titles, image captions, etc…)
• Understand that search engines are unlikely to fully index a large collection. For example, Google has an indexing quota for each website, that depends among other things on its perceived importance and age. The quota is in Bytes, so displaying reasonably sized and optimally compressed images helps. Loading speed also counts, so using a platform that is fast and produces concise website code will yield better SEO (PhotoDeck-generated website are exceptionally fast and light in code, which helps with both indexing depth and ranking).
• If SEO is important to you, make sure to read our guide about SEO for photographers!

Search and main categories prominent on an eye-catching front page

Beside being visually appealing, your homepage must immediately make clear to prospective buyers that you offer usage licenses and prints, and clarify your subject specialty. It should also entice them to start browsing or searching.

Here is a common and proven solution for your homepage to achieve these objectives:

• Display your main categories as large clickable thumbnails so visitors can start browsing your collection right away. The easiest way is to set the top of the stock section’s gallery tree as your front page (as we have seen above, you might have other top-level galleries than the stock library). PhotoDeck allows you to set any gallery as the front page, and you can even use a dedicated gallery style for it to display the main categories on the front page, for example with very large thumbnails. Getting the main categories right on your front page will help not only prospective clients but also your SEO.
• To make your homepage even more attractive, display a slideshow in a banner above the main categories. Like a mini-portfolio, this is an opportunity to display eye-catching images and will also help visitors understand what kind of imagery you provide. Make sure that the banner slideshow does not use the full space on screen so that visitors immediately see that by scrolling further down, they can browse by categories (in other words, at least part of the category thumbnails should be visible without scrolling, regardless of the visitor’s screen size). In PhotoDeck, banners have a setting to set their height as a percentage of the screen height for this purpose.
• Add a prominent search box, for example layered on top of the banner slideshow. When creating the banner slideshow in PhotoDeck, use the template that automatically adds the search box.
• Also add text that very briefly describes what you offer and what your images are about, high in the page. Adding more extensive text under the categories could also help your SEO efforts.

A good watermark

Watermarks applied to the images displayed in your galleries are the most effective means to prevent image theft on your website. If your business would be negatively affected by people grabbing images or video previews on your website and using them for free, you cannot afford not having an effective watermark.

A good watermark is a fine balance between protection against theft and image legibility and appeal. The advent of AI-based watermark removal tools make the equation even more complex. Here are some general recommendations:

• Part of the watermark should be highly readable, helping also with attribution (i.e. your business name or URL should be visible).
• The watermark should cover a wide part of the image. For example, a combination of a relatively faint watermark across most of the image combined with a stronger but more localized text or logo.
• Trying to defeat ever-learning AI tools is a cat and mouse game. It will be harder for AI tools to remove fully opaque watermarks (i.e. with no transparency at all) obfuscating key parts of an image (but you’re right thinking that such a watermark is also more intrusive and disturbing for clients).
• The watermark is a good place to display a clear copyright ownership notice, which can be useful in case of litigation following unauthorized use.

For images in publicly accessible galleries, you might also consider using a commercial service to detect unauthorized uses and recover usage fees through legal pressure (and legal action if it comes down to it). If you chose to go this path, Pixsy is such a service, and it is integrated with PhotoDeck to help automatically identify unauthorized uses of images taken from participating PhotoDeck websites, and take action on them.

Lightbox feature enabled

A lightbox is a selection of images and videos made by a user on your website. It is a useful feature for clients when they need multiple images, especially if the selection is a multi-stage process and they need to come back to it later on. So make sure that this feature is available on your website.

On PhotoDeck, lightboxes can be easily shared among a client team, that can also leave comments and collaborate. Once a selection is ready, the client can easily order it at once.

Clear online pricing and easy online ordering

In this day and age, clients expect to get what they need, including digital files, immediately. So your website should allow buyers to easily find images, see their prices, select an option and order online within a few minutes and without further human intervention.

This means that when seeing an image or video they’d like to purchase, selecting a price option (for example download size, usage right, or, in the case of prints, paper and framing type) should feel natural, and ordering should then be the obvious next step in that online workflow.

Therefore, you should make sure that whatever product you offer, beside being at a price that works both you and your clients, is immediately purchasable on your website.

Beyond simple download sales, PhotoDeck makes it easy to create licensing pricing structures based on image or video usage (with fully customizable templates for example for rights-managed licenses) as well as to allow clients to buy prints in many sizes and configurations. While a feature exists to allow and manage custom quotes, given the flexibility offered, it should be a “backup” solution.

Online payment… and delivery

Similarly, buyers should have the option to pay online to complete their purchase, and immediately receive what they ordered (provided for example no retouching is required).

When using PhotoDeck with Stripe or PayPal, payments go directly and immediately to your own account and ready-to-deliver digital files are immediately sent to the client (fulfillment for ordered prints is also automatically started when using an integrated lab).

PhotoDeck also provides an “offline payment” option that lets you manage payments manually, for example when clients prefer to pay via a method not offered online, or if they are to be invoiced later on.

Once you have connected to an online payment provider and/or set up offline payments, don’t forget to fully test the ordering process all the way to delivery!

Integrated client galleries

Even if your website is fully set up for self-service image/video rights licensing and print sales, some clients will always contact you to request for suggestions, and you are also likely to have to deliver specific files outside of the normal order/purchase workflow.

Or perhaps, like many photographers, selling licenses and prints is just one part of your business, and you also regularly complete work-for-hire assignments where you need to let clients select images from a project and download them, perhaps with retouching involved.

It is therefore a good idea to make sure that your galleries’ structure is built in a way that lets you easily create private and protected galleries to distribute images to clients, separately from your public stock galleries, but in the same system so it is easy to manage different kind of workflows with your clients.

In practise, it simply means that:

• Your galleries are (in your website’s platform admin space) split into different “main folders“ for public stock galleries and private client galleries for easy organization and maintenance (naturally, on your public-facing website, only the public stock galleries will be readily visible).
• You are familiar with the client gallery proofing and delivery features offered by your platform. PhotoDeck is also a very complete online proofing tool for assignment photography, and you might want to also check our other checklists on that topic!

An easy way for clients to request a custom quote

Even if you offer a wide range of products for direct purchase in your online shop, you might also want to let clients inquire about the price for a specific usage license or different print options. Especially larger commercial clients might ask for special terms or a discount. In this case, make sure that you make it straightforward for them to do so, either via a generic contact form or via a dedicated facility.

In addition to providing an easy way to clients to contact you and request a price, it helps if you can provide quotes via the same platform to make the payment collection and/or the delivery easier.

PhotoDeck integrates a feature that lets you easily create custom quotations, with items that can be automatically delivered as downloads or sent for print fulfillment to an integrated partner lab. This also helps ensure that all orders are managed in a single location.

Useful info pages and portfolio…

Your stock photography licensing website should not be anonymous nor obscure. Make sure to include detailed info pages about who you are, the kind of work you do, what clients can expect from you, and with detailed contact information.

Similarly, a dedicated portfolio section (and perhaps referrals) will help people understand your work, and that is of course especially important if you make yourself available for new assignments and projects.

PhotoDeck provides all the tools needed to create great-looking free-format content pages and display portfolio galleries, so you can build a full online presence on the same platform!

… or seamless integration with another website

Alternatively, if your main website is on a separate platform, make sure that both websites are well integrated for a seamless user experience:

• Clear links in in both websites’ navigation menus (perhaps the same navigation in both sites);
• Consistent branding: logo, colors, typography.

PhotoDeck specifically allows the integration with another website, so that for example all Home links redirect to your “main“ website.

Legal matters in good standing

Needless to say, you want to make sure to not expose yourself to legal troubles or bad surprises. This will mean slightly different things based on where your business is based, but the following must be in order:

• Taxes: if you use your website to sell online and are subject to sales taxes (e.g. VAT), your website should be set up to collect them, and you should know how to report them to your tax authorities. Double-check with your accountant or local tax office for peace of mind!
• Data protection: make sure that your clients’ personal data is processed according to your privacy laws, for example the GDPR in Europe. This requires both a platform that does not do anything incompatible with the law (like PhotoDeck), but also that you yourself comply to it when processing personal data.
• Terms and conditions: when licensing images, make sure that your clients agree with terms that for example prohibit uses not covered by the license. PhotoDeck lets you ensure the client accepts your terms when ordering, and automatically include T&Cs in PDF form with digital file deliveries.
• Mandatory mentions: make sure that your website and other formal documents (for example, receipt invoices) include the necessary mentions.

See related checklists

• Client galleries for commercial and corporate photography

‹ View all checklists