Fotolia

Fotolia are probably the biggest Microstock agency in the world (they certainly make this claim), originally started in France, and now based out of New York, they're big enough to be highly selective in the images they host, and to have a massive library (3.6 million at last count.)

I've been on Fotolia for a good few months now, I've still not many images hosted with them, as most of the shots I take are of landscapes, animals, or plants, all of which are massively populated categories on Fotolia.

As a result of this, these shots, unless they're particularly excellent will be rejected by the staff reviewers. This is a sensible move for Fotolia as they'll be ensuring underused categories are growing steadily, while their resources, and buyers time, is not wasted digging through mountains of unsalable stock.

Friends who use Fotolia highly recommend uploading mostly product shots of all kinds of household products, while Fotolia themselves suggest focussing on products relating to large industries, so shots of technological goods and services, business (people in work situations), and pharmaceuticals will be good sellers. If you're looking to sell anything out of their market though, don't bother, Fotolia are VERY selective, try somewhere else.

Good images, well focussed for a market DO sell, and they sell well. Their commission rates for sellers are not great, they run around 50% of sale price for exlusive images, and 33% for non-exclusive images, although there is some space to improve on this rate with certain license types and increased rankings.

For buyers, the searching system in Fotolia is very simple, you can browse by a pretty decent list of categories, each with upwards of 50,000 images to choose from, or use their simple text search service which has ordering and filters as you'd expect.

Pricing starts at $1 for basic small web images, and a variety of licenses are on offer, to ensure you're able to purchase the image you need, for a satisfactory price. Along with a fairly substantial Free section, and their API allowing a lot of other sites to help you search their library, I'm sure designers and publishers will find what they need.

More pricing information can be found at http://us.fotolia.com/Info/RoyaltyFreePhotos

So?

Fotolia are a good company to be buying from, however to be selling with them, you need to be good at spotting niche microstock markets, and be willing to take a little bit of a hit on the commissions you'll earn.

If you have experiences of dealing with Fotolia as a buyer or a seller, please let us know.