 Alright, in this video, I'm going to show you how to sell photos from your phone in stock photography. I'm going to start off with some of the most common questions about cell phone stock photography. Then I'm going to go through how to set up the apps on your phone that you need to be able to sell your photos in stock photography. And lastly, I'm going to walk you through the workflow. Take one of my cell phone photos, and I'll take it from taking the picture all the way through getting it sold online. So when you get done this video, you'll be able to sell your cell phone photos as stock photography. Let's get into it. Now the inevitable first question that comes with cell phone photography is, is the quality of the cell phone photos good enough to sell as stock? Well, the answer is pretty simple. For the most part, if you have a phone that was made in the last two years, that phone's camera is good enough to take photos that could be sold as stock photography. Now although all newer cell phones have cameras good enough to sell as stock photography, there are still some certain types of photography that camera phones aren't good at. The main one being low light photography. So if you have one of the really new phones that just came out that has some better low light features, this may not apply to you. But for most phones made in the last couple of years, the low light photography isn't good because they have a lot of noise, and that's just because cell phones have a much smaller sensor. So although, you know, if you're taking photos in really good light, those ones will be good enough to sell as stock photography. But if you're taking photos in like a dimly lit bar or trying to take like night milky way shots, those ones may not be good enough to sell as stock photography if you take them on a cell phone. Next I want to get into how to set up your phone and what apps you need to sell your photos as stock photography. Now I know that about half the people that watch my videos are very new to stock photography and probably never sold a photo as stock before. And that's fine. You're going to be able to go through things in detail. But the other half of people already are selling their photos as stock probably from their DSLR or their mirrorless camera. Now for the people that are already selling their photos as stock, you may want to skip ahead about a minute because I need to spend a bit of time just walking through how to set up your accounts for stock photography before I get into how you actually set up the apps and the software on your phone. All right, if you're brand new to selling your photos as stock photography, the first thing you need to decide is where you're going to sell your photos. Now you have two main different types of sites you can use to sell your photos as stock. One is your own website and the other one is microstock sites. Now the main difference is that microstock sites already have a lot of buyers searching for photos on their sites whereas if you set up your own website you're probably going to need to do some marketing or some social media marketing to send buyers to your site so they can see your photos. So if you already get a lot of requests to purchase your photos as stock, maybe you've got a large following on social media and buyers are seeing your photos there or you have some other way to get your photo in front of buyers, you may be best to set up your own website and just sell your own photos as stock and then you can use your social media to send buyers to your website. Now there's lots of different sites that you can do this with but I personally recommend using Smugmug and I've got some other videos on this channel about how to set up Smugmug to sell your photos as stock and I'll put a link up here to some of them. Now if you don't have a way to get your photo in front of a lot of stock photography buyers, no worries you can just use the microstock sites. Now they are going to take a much bigger cut of the photo sale because they're the ones that are bringing in the buyers but you can get started much easier than your own website. Now there's lots of microstock sites out there that you could use but what I recommend is starting off with Shutterstock and Adobe stock because they're the biggest ones and once you get successful on those sites you can start uploading your photos to other sites. I've got other videos on this channel about how to set up your Adobe stock and your Shutterstock account so if you need to do that I'll put links to those videos up here. Now personally I upload my photos to a lot of different sites including Smugmug, Adobe stock and Shutterstock and I'll be getting into exactly how to do that from your phone later in the video. Alright so if you made it this far in the video you should now know which sites you want to sell your photos as a stock and the next thing is you need to get those apps installed on your phone. Now there's two main types of apps you're going to need to sell on your phone to be able to sell your photos as stocks. The first one is photo editing apps and then you're also going to need photo uploading apps. Now the reason you need photo editing apps is you're typically going to want to tweak your photos a little bit before uploading to the stock sites. I'll typically bring them into a photo editing app and maybe I'll change the crop a little bit, straighten it out. Sometimes the contrast, I'll change that a bit or change the exposure a little bit just to kind of make the photos pop. I don't do major edits when I'm selling photos from my phone like I would on a desktop sometimes but you typically are going to want some sort of photo editing app to do some tweaks to the photos. Now there's definitely no shortage of photo editing apps on the app stores so you may already have one you like and that's fine. If you don't, I typically recommend using Snapseed or Lightroom. Those are kind of my two favorites. If you don't have an Adobe subscription then you probably want to go to Snapseed because it's free and it's a great little photo editing app but I personally use Lightroom on my computer so I also use Lightroom on my phone so that I can keep all my photos in one spot. However, all these little photo editing apps work the same way. Let me show you how I edit one of my photos in Lightroom before uploading it to stock. So here I am on my phone in Lightroom. Now I have all my phone photos. They auto add to one of my albums here so I can go in here. And typically what I'll do is I'll go through and I'll star the ones that I want to upload so I don't upload every photo to stock. I typically take like 10 photos of a subject and I'll choose the best one. So here's one here that I took when I was just out walking. This is actually right behind my house and we recently had a lot of snow and then it melted and then a lot of rain. So there's a field here that's flooded. It's all nice reflection. So I thought I'd go in and take a photo. So this is the one that I'm going to edit in Lightroom. So I'm going to edit here. And typically the first thing I'll start off with is doing a bit of cropping. So I'll take a look at the crop. I kind of like that crop there. I just want to maybe straighten it a little bit straight. There we go. So I think that looks pretty good for the crop and the straight. Now what I'm going to do is go in and change some of the light first. First I want to go through and I'm going to try to bring some of the shadows up and some of the highlights down. You can see how those clouds are kind of blown out a bit at the top there. And I think I'm going to also just bring down the exposure a little bit. I'm just trying to get a nice looking photo here. Maybe the shadows up a bit more and I'm going to bring the contrast a bit more. So again, just kind of some minor tweaks to the photos. Now the last thing I'm going to do is I'm going to warm this up a little bit. Maybe like that. So that looks pretty good. So again, I don't do a lot of editing on my phone. Just kind of some minor edits before I upload them to the stock sites. Now to save it, you just click the share button up here. And then what I want to do is I want to export it. I choose exports that I can go through and I want to always do the largest available dimensions and set the quality to 100%. So what this is going to do is it's going to take the edited photo and export it to my phones that I can upload it to the stock sites. All right, great. Now we have a photo that we can upload to the stock sites. Now how you're going to upload to the sites used to sell your photos is stock really depends on the sites you've chosen. Some sites have contributor apps where there's an app that you can use to upload your photos. Whereas other sites don't. And then you need to go in with your browser to the website to upload the photos. Now, I'll put a list up here of some of the most common stock sites and whether they have a contributor app to upload the photo or whether you need to do it via the browser. Now, uploading to all the sites is definitely the most tedious part about selling your photos at stock. You need to upload them, give them titles and descriptions. Also, it's really important to give them keywords as well, too. And I've got lots of other videos about how to do keywords on this channel. So I'll put some links up here and you can go and find those as well. All right, now, personally, I don't have the patience to go to multiple different sites and upload my photo and choose the keywords each time, which is why we develop the PhotoLU app. Now, what the PhotoLU app does is I can open the PhotoLU app and then what it will do is suggest keywords for me and then it helps me upload my photos to all the different sites at once. Now, the PhotoLU app is available on the Apple App Store as well as the Google Play Store. So I'll put some links down in the description below that you can use to go directly to the app and install it on your phone. Now, if you're following along with your phone on this video, really appreciate it. If after you install the app, if you just give us five stars, it really shows me that these videos are useful as well. It really helps our rankings and helps more people find the app. If you're not following along at home, feel free just to go down and like this video because that helps out as well. Now, I'm not going to go through how to set up PhotoLU and the PhotoLU app to link it to all your different sites because I've got another video on that. And I'll put a link to that video up here. But what you what I'd recommend is that you set up the PhotoLU app on your computer, on your desktop, because it's a lot easier to do, I find, than doing it on the phone, although it is possible to link your stock sites from the phone if you don't want to do it on a computer. So here I am in the PhotoLU app. I've already logged in and this is my homepage so I can see photos that I've uploaded in the past. I'm going to go over here to the upload tab. Now I'm going to choose a photo from my photo library. And what you want to make sure is to choose the edited version. So that's typically going to be the most recent one. So I'm going to choose that photo. Now I can choose which sites that I want this photo to be uploaded. So you can see these are all the sites that I've already linked to my PhotoLU app. So I'm going to upload it to all of them. So my social sites and my stock photography site. So I'll click next. Now I want to enter in my title and description. So that's the title and description that I'll use on my social sites. But I also want to enter in another title and description for the stock sites, one that's more keyword rich. Next, I need to enter in my keywords. So what I can do is go out and there's a number of keywords that are suggested, so I'm going to go through and choose the most appropriate ones. And once I've chosen ones from suggested, I'll typically type in a couple more that the A.I. Suggesting algorithm couldn't find. Next is my Facebook post. I'm just going to use my social title and description for that one to move on. Now I'm going to enter in the tweet. I'm going to use my description. And just add in a hashtag. Now I want to do my shared Instagram. So I'm going to choose the title and description. And then choose some of the appropriate hashtags. I can also choose different popularities. I'm going to move to the most popular ones and see if there's anything in here I like. Now I can also manually enter some in. Now I can check to make sure that I've entered everything correctly and just click save and post now to have it uploaded to all of the sites. Now, as it gets uploaded to the site, you can pull down to refresh the page and the icons will change colors. Now, a green icon represents the fact that it was uploaded and no further action is required, whereas a blue icon is for sites where you still need to go into the site to resubmit them and typically the stock sites require that. Now, isn't that easier than uploading the photo individually using eight different apps or your browser? The next thing I'm going to do here is I'm going to go through and upload it to Instagram. So down to the bottom, I've got a shared Instagram and I can post this photo Instagram. The reason I post it to Instagram is although I can't sell my photos from the Instagram app, what I am able to do is get followers on Instagram and then they'll go back to my smug mug site where they can purchase my photos of stock. All right, great. Now you've got your photo uploaded to all the sites that you want to sell your photos of stock. Now, some of the stock photo sites have another step where you need to go through and submit it. Let me show you how you do that with Shutterstock. So here I am in the Shutterstock contributor app. I'm just going to go over and click on the arrow for the submit content section. Now, you can see that the photo is already here available because photo Lou has already uploaded it to Shutterstock. So what I need to do is just click on it and then I can click on edit. And you can also see the description I entered into photo Lou is already here. All the keywords are already here. So what I just need to do is go through and choose a category. Add any releases if I had them and then just submit it to the stock site. So that submission has now been successful and it's waiting for Shutterstock to review it before it goes on sale in the Shutterstock site. Now, if this is your first time selling a photo line, that may seem pretty complicated, but once you get used to the workflow, I think you'll be able to find that you'll be able to go from taking a photo to uploading it to all the different sites within a couple of minutes, as long as you're going to use in the photo Lou app to streamline the workflow. Now, if you have any questions about this, feel free to let me know in the comments below. Also, my YouTube channel is all about making money from your photos online. So if that interests you, you can go down and subscribe and then make sure you like the video. Best of luck selling your photos online.