iPhoneographers Rejoice: Easily License and Sell Your Photos
Have you been wondering how to make money with the thousands of photos sitting on your iPhone? Well, if you don’t want to print them out, you can always sell the license and try and make a few bucks. That’s the goal behind the iPhone app Foap, an online marketplace in iStock/Getty style.
The idea is pretty simple. You take a photo, you think it’s pretty rad, and you upload it to Foap. If it fits within their criteria, it gets accepted and can be purchased by anyone for $10. The return is unusually generous: those who upload photos get a 50% kickback of $5 per purchased photo. It doesn’t seem like the criteria they use to select photos is too strict either, as New York Times journalist Roy Furchgott discovered. He uploaded 25 photos, 21 of which were accepted.
Good news to those who hate Instagram, Foap doesn’t accept altered images. They have to be unprocessed.
Be careful though, as any image you upload you forsake the rights to. As Furchgott says. “A potential hitch is that all rights are sold when the photos are sent in. If you send in a picture of your grandmother and it shows up on a poster saying, “Help Elderly Drug Addicts,” tough luck. You have no recourse.”
As “iPhoneography” gets more and more popular, don’t be surprised to see increasing numbers of services and apps like Foap.
What do you think? Would you use this service? Who is buying these images do you think? Foap supposedly paid out $15,000 in its first week, so someone must be grabbing them for something.
Foap is free to download at the iTunes app store.
[Via the New York Times]
