From the day the first mobile phone with an integrated camera hit the market, mobile photography rose in popularity to the point of influencing styles, concepts, offer and demand in the entire industry, including, of course, stock photography.
Enter EyeEm, a photo-sharing community that quickly introduced the EyeEm market, a way for mobile photographers to make money from their best work, and for creatives to find the perfect high-quality, mobile-shot stock images. Developing deals with prestigious partner sites, Eyeem.com and the EyeEm collection are now a synonym of premium mobile stock photos.
Want to know more? Read on.
EyeEm Marketplace: Royalty-Free, Premium Mobile Photos
EyeEm was founded in 2011 in Berlin, where it’s still headquartered. While starting life as a community platform for photography lovers –both with a mobile app and website–, in 2015 they made the leap towards microstock and opened their Marketplace, a segment where users can sell their images under a royalty-free license –as long as model releases and property releases are in place–, splitting the profit with the company.
EyeEm market prices are very competitive and also straightforward. Image buyers can opt between Essential budget images and Premium stock photos, and pay by the unit. Here are the pricing details:
- Essential images: $29 each
- Premium images: $199 each
Do keep in mind these prices apply to their standard license, which is a regular royalty-free agreement for unlimited digital and print use including social media, limited to 5000 print copies.
If you want unlimited copies, to use the photo in retail products, or on broadcast or TV, then you’ll need an extended license that enables such uses. Prices for extended licenses are higher, as you could expect:
- Essential extended license: $99
- Premium extended license: $349
For more information, you can check EyeEm license terms here.
How to view EyeEm Market? Very simple! Simply go to Eyeem Marketplace and use the search bar or the curated galleries below it, to discover over 100 million beautiful, licensable images.
They also offer an Enterprise service, tailored to your brand’s needs, which you can get quoted upon request. Other bonus services include Custom (a platform to hire a photographer) and Missions where you can place a photo request and choose from content submitted to it.
EyeEm Collection in Getty Images, Adobe Stock, and Alamy: Premium Mobile Images
EyeEm members can make money not only by selling their photos on Market but also through two cool, big-name partner sites: Getty Images, Adobe Stock and Alamy.
Having a premium collection on each of these well-known and high-performing stock photo agencies, EyeEm gives its contributors more chances to expose and sell their content. The EyeEm collections are highly curated so it’s hard to be selected (you can opt your images in, but you cannot upload to the partner sites directly), but those whose work is picked access to a wider buyer base and potentially greater earnings.
For you, it means you can license EyeEm’s high-quality mobile stock photos as part of your Adobe Stock, Alamy or Getty Images regular purchases.
EyeEm Tech: AI at the Service of Photography
Another feature of EyeEm worth knowing is how heavily tech-oriented the company is. Their tech eagerness is somewhat comparable to that of Shutterstock, one of the biggest fishes in the micrsotock sea.
The most important of their developments is certainly EyeEm Vision, their very own AI technology that applies machine learning algorithms and interaction with human curators to automate various key tasks.
Photo tagging and image search/suggestion, yes, but also and more innovative, Vision applications can analyze your camera roll to find artistically valuable images, as well as analyze your brand’s preferences to summon up the perfect photos to go with your personality.
Like this, photographers can rely on EyeEm to tell them which photos on their iPhone are worth uploading to Market, and creatives can enter a few parameters and receive tons of on-brand images for their goals.
EyeEm Photography Community: From Berlin to the World
EyeEm is based in Germany but leads a global network of photographers around the concept of mobile-shot images that, they claim, is focused on a love for photography and a wish to empower visual artists and connect them with brands and image buyers looking for content for their campaigns.
In the almost ten years since its launch, EyeEm has developed that love for photography on various artistic fronts. There is the EyeEm magazine, the EyeEm blog, multiple events in major artistic capitals (Berlin, New York, London), they even have the EyeEm awards for photography!
Eyeem.com, is still a vibrant and very engaged community platform where over 25 million photo enthusiasts and consumed photographers share and sell their best work.
If you are into authentic, mobile-shot, and premium stock images, EyeEm Market is certainly worth a try.
