What Are Your Images Worth? – Dennis Hays

Let's face it, your collection of images is your inventory, not your camera equipment. Your cameras, lenses, filters, tripods and all of the accessories, including memory cards, are tools, much like the hammer and saws for a carpenter. What you produce using the cameras is what you sell.

Now that we have that straight, we can approach the questions of what to do with the images. Besides backing them up, your images are potential dollars, sitting and waiting to be sold (Yes, I know we're really talking about here is usage  and stock photography proceeds, not the actual sale of an image—transferring ownership for money. For the sake of this article, I'm using the expedient terminology of "sale").

As your images are your product, you need to protect them from loss and theft. Loss can be prevented through persistent backups and theft, by claiming your copyright as necessary and registering your collection with the appropriate authority (the United States Copyright Office in the U.S. and similar offices in other countries) and tracking down illegal use on the Internet and other media.

Once you are satisfied your inventory is safe, you can begin to determine its worth. This can be difficult as not every image in your collection will be sold and, those that do, probably return various amounts, depending on use.

It's only after considerable time has past, licensing usage rights in your type of photography and stock photography returns, that you can find the mean value of each image. This figure is a reference, but should give you an idea for planning and estimating purposes. You can determine the mean or average value by adding all the  fees you charged during the year (or other meaningful time) and dividing it by the number of images licensed—not all you own, just those actually licensed for use.

This, of course, does not include recoverable funds for travel, lodging or other expenses, nor does it include ancillary fees, such as post-processing, CD/DVD compilation and location scouting, for instance. This number represents a baseline amount an image produces; that's all.

Once you have ascertained the average dollar a single image produces, you can get the best use of this number as a guideline to raise it the next year, thereby increasing your rate of return. It's assumed of course, that you are getting better, as a photographer, and, as such, your images are worth more.

The cost of doing business increases every year and with the economy eating away at potential revenue sources (spiraling death throes of magazines, decreased ad revenue, lower budgets), it's important to generate more income to offset lost sales opportunities.

If you were to apply the average usage fee by the total images you have in your collection (potential sales whether for stock, fine art, etc.), you have an approximate value of your inventory. This number, again for reference purposes only, is the amount of potential sales available.

Okay, the down and dirty here is in finding what one image represents as a monetary amount. If in the next year you calculate the average again and the figure for one image rises, you could say you are becoming more efficient as you get a better return per image. That is the real value of an image; as a marker to determine your growth. Fewer images at higher sales produces a higher figure per image or, to put it another way… You take hundreds (thousands) of images per assignment and, if more images are sold, as a percentage, you can assume you are becoming better by making judicious choices with the shutter. After all, anyone can press the shutter but knowing when is the true mark.

This may all be so much tripe to some of you, but for others, it can be a marker of how you are progressing.

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