I have decided to add mostphotos.com to the list of agencies I supply with my main microstock portfolio. They are certainly not among the big sellers but they offer 50% of royalties, even on their subscription sales. And they are offering direct bank transfer for payouts which comes in handy as they are based in Stockholm, Sweden, and can transfer the money directly to my German account – hopefully avoiding the huge transaction fees usually taken by PayPal & other online money providers.

Mostphotos.com claims to offer about 5.5 million photos at the moment which is about one fifth of what the big libraries contain. This would also mean that my images have a five times higher chance to get found among the masses. Even with a smaller client base this should be a slight advantage.

Uploading procedure at mostphotos.com: FTP and without inspection

And there is another advantage of mostphotos.com, at least for professionally working stock photographers: While you can upload your images through FTP to all major microstock sites (except iStockphoto), they take a while to process your images and make them available for sale. Mostphotos.com puts more trust in their photographers and most likely in their search engines, so all images are published by the photographer directly.

This way I was able to put up around 1,000 images within 24 hours after signing up. However, I have found that my images – at the moment – are presented mostly towards the end of searches, even for images matching a query very specifically. This might indicate that a contributor’s or at least an image history is having quite some importance to the structuring of the search results. I will keep an eye on this and try to find out more over time. For the moment I assume it will take quite a while to see regular sales on mostphotos.