How To Make Money Off Your Travel Photos Without Being A Professional

Unsplash/Sergei Akulich

So you just paid over $1,000 to go on the vacation of a lifetime and left paradise with a sad bank account…and 400 incredible pics from your trip. You probably never thought to ask how you can make money off your travel photos because most likely, you’re not a professional or a travel blogger with thousands of followers. But guess what: you can still make some serious cash.

Traveler and photographer James Wheeler wrote in PetaPixel that he wondered what his thousands of travel photos could be worth to other people. He started uploading his high-resolution photos to stock sites like Microstock in the hopes of making enough money just to buy a new lens.

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“Some of the sites rejected about half the photos as not being high enough quality, but enough got accepted for me to start making about $100 month in sales across the sites,” Wheeler said.

Wheeler said that he was uploading photos every month, and the more he uploaded, the more he realized what good photos really were and improved his photography skills. Eventually, he took one photo that he says stood out among the rest. It netted him more money than all his other photos combined.

“It’s a photo of Moraine lake in Alberta, Canada, and over the past five years, it has made over $4,000 across the various microstock and print-on-demand sites,” Wheeler said.

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The best part about the payout: he was able to pay himself back for that vacation, which cost him over $3,500. Wheeler said that though the majority of his photos only garnered a few dollars here and there, he’s had enough cases like the Morraine lake photo to cover his travel costs and more.

So basically, he was traveling for free and at times being paid to travel.

Travel fiends: if it’s your dream to get more than just cultural experience out of your time abroad, this route may not be too shabby. Just upload a few photos to some stock sites and see what happens. At the end of the day, you have nothing to lose, and everything to gain.