Selling photographic prints of your work is a great way to make passive income as a photographer, but getting the process rolling can be a bit cumbersome. The Saal Photo Portal makes it easy to get started selling your own work online with just a few simple steps.
The Saal Photo Portal essentially works as a storefront for your photographic work. Clients can browse through galleries of your work and then order high-quality prints or digital copies of their favorites. Saal Digital produces the products and handles shipping. It’s free to set up an account and you don’t have to pay commissions on the sales that you make. As a photographer you set the prices for all of the products that are available through your store and maintain your copyright. Ultimately we think it’s a great hassle-free event to sell prints from a wedding or event or make some extra money off of older work from your portfolio.
Here are our tips for getting started selling your photographs online using the Saal Digital Portal.
#1 Choose Your Images
Take a thoughtful look at your portfolio and pick some images that stand out and might make nice wall art. Make sure when making your selects that the images you are choosing are ones that you actually own the copyright too and have the legal right to sell. If the images were captured as part of an event, for a large corporate client or feature a celebrity just double check your contracts to confirm ownership. If you are creating a clients-only gallery from an event like a wedding or an engagement session keep your image edit tight. The more photos that you add inside your gallery will just make it difficult for would-be customers to decide what they might want to purchase. A highly curated gallery of images will make it much easier for your customers to choose something from your portfolio.
#2 Build a Gallery
The Saal Photo Portal lets you create multiple galleries of images, which is convenient if you intend on selling a variety of photos through the site. If you are using the tool to share private photo galleries with clients make sure that each job gets separated into a unique gallery. Saal’s galleries can be set to private or public, which makes it easy for you as a photographer to keep certain sets of images behind a password. If you are using the Photo Portal to sell more generic images from your archive we’d still recommend creating individual galleries that make it easy for customers to peruse images based on some kind of theme. For example, street photography images should be kept in separate galleries from wildlife or landscape images. Once you’ve added your images to the Photo Portal make sure you turn on ordering for your gallery.
#3 Price Your Work
Choosing what to charge for your printed images is a struggle for a lot of photographers. Saal’s Photo Portal allows you a ton of flexibility when setting your prices depending on the types of products that you will be selling. If you are selling a wide variety of products through the portal, we’d plan on pricing them per-object. For example a customer who wants your images printed on a photo canvas or a or on a brushed metal print should expect to pay more than someone looking for a simple photo print. You can also set prices for digital files and define the price based on the resolution of the image. The price that Saal sets for its individual product types can be a helpful guideline for setting your own prices, but we’d also recommend doing a bit of market research and pricing your own work accordingly.
#4 Share Your Galleries
Once you’ve built you galleries and set your prices its time to share. If you are using the Saal Photo Portal to enable clients to easily order prints we’d recommend keeping your galleries private and sharing personal links to the individual galleries that they might be interested in. If you are a wedding or portrait photographer we think this is the best way to allow your customers to see the work, while still keeping the images private. If you are using the Saal Photo Portrait to sell work from your portfolio for anyone to purchase we’d recommend sharing the links more widely through social media sites or through a direct link on your portfolio site.
Check out the video below for more tips on how to get started selling your work through the Saal Photo Portal.
