Fotolia pride themselves as a worldwide social marketplace where advertisers and artists can meet to buy and sell royalty free stock images. This microstock agency launched in 2005 and has grown in the last 5 years to one of the giants, sporting well over 8 000 000 images in their portfolio. A few years ago sales with Fotolia were reported to be quite slow and inconsistent however later trends suggest quite the opposite.

The Fotolia website has a fresh and modern feel to it and is quite user friendly. One of the very nice features is the selection of an image will lead to it’s sale page and not only list related images found in the same series, it also shows files associated with that particular model. This can be highly advantages in selling more images.

Fotolia ranks in my top 4 agencies, some photographers would even place them higher than that. They offer a good commission and even let photographers choose the sale price, flexibility on this depends on rank. Fotolia have a ranking system that determines how much your images can sell for, your rank is determined by how many images you sell. See ranking system below.

Submitting to fotolia is fairly easy, they have moderate standards of quality. Higher than those of Shutterstock, but not as strict as iStockphoto. The feedback you do receive on rejected images is not very helpful and usually leaves you questioning why your image was rejected. One of the very helpful tools while submitting to Fotolia is keyword ordering. You are able to move keywords up and down an order based on their relevance to your image, This helps searches to be more accurate and stops people from randomly dumping a list of popular keywords onto any random image in hopes that it will appear in many searches. Optimizing your keywords can take time, but it is well worth the effort and will reflect in your sales.

Fotolia do have an exclusive program whereby you can earn a higher percentage of commission for each sale. The nice thing about this program is that you can select which images you want to submit as exclusive and can still operate as a multi-microstock agency submitter. Provided that Fotolia is the only place your exclusive submission is available for sale. Another very nice section of their website is the Infinite collection. This is a collection of high quality images submitted from traditional macrostock or rights managed agencies. The collection is guaranteed to be cheaper than anywhere else these files exist for sale and the price is considerably higher than their standard collection. Contributors who have reached emerald status on the ranking system are able to submit images to the Infinite collection.

Overall I would recommend Fotolia as one of the best microstock agencies out there, one to concentrate your work on.

Sign up with Fotolia here