If you are a professional photographer (or even a hobby photographer), you know that it can be quite profitable to sell your digital photos from your own online store since you won't need to pay commissions to anyone else. This tutorial shows you how easy it is to sell photos using WordPress and the WP eStore plugin.
The Problem
There are quite a few ways how you can setup an online photo store for selling photos, but most solutions require you to create a unique product for every photo that you want to sell. This can be very time consuming, especially for Wedding photographers or Sporting photographers who may have hundreds of photos for sale every weekend after an event and do not want to spend a lot of time getting the photos ready for sale.
Since I am assuming you already have a WordPress site, you want to know how to sell photos from WordPress.
The Solution
If you haven't got time to create a unique product for every photo (that's the big problem), this tutorial shows how you can get a online photo store operational using WordPress in just a few minutes by configuring only one product that you can use as a template for all the photos you want to sell.
With this rapid solution, there are a few limitations:
- All the photos in a gallery must have the same price (although later you can create multiple galleries, each with its own price)
- Each photo cannot have variations of file size (you can only sell one size of each photo - I'll cover this in a future tutorial)
These limitations are worth it if you have heaps of photos to sell (wedding photos to a select client base), or batches of photos that are not suitable for submission to stock photography sites.
This solution makes it so easy to upload a bunch of photos and have them all for sale at the same price.
Video Tutorial
Watch the video tutorial below and then read the detailed description with links to all the tools you'll need so you can start selling photos from your WordPress site within a few minutes.
Like the quality of the screencast? I use the Screenflow app for it!
Tutorial Details
The aim of this tutorial is to setup an online store so you can start selling a lot of photos quickly. All you will need to do is configure one product with the price, variation and shipping options that you prefer and then use that product’s information as a template to create a “Buy Now” button for every image in your gallery. Note that the name of the product will be dynamically changed to the “alt text” of the image on a per image basis and upon purchase the “image url” for that image from the NextGen gallery will be given as a download.
Step 1: Tools Needed
Like any solution, you'll need a few tools to get the job done. Download and install the following items:
- Your own WordPress Site (self-hosted WordPress installation)
- NextGENGallery Plugin - A free gallery plugin. Make sure to create a gallery and upload some photos into the gallery before proceeding with the rest of this tutorial.
- WP eStore Plugin - WP Plugin specifically designed to sell digital products. This plugin does everything you need to sell stuff online...you can sell much more than just photos.
- WP eStore NextGENGallery Addon - A free addon for WP eStore.
Step 2: Enter your PayPal Account Info
Make sure that you get paid by entering your PayPal account information.
- Go to WP eStore -> Settings
- Go to the Payment Gateway Settings tab
- Check the Use PayPal Payment Gateway checkbox
- Enter your PayPal Email address
- Update your settings (scroll to bottom of config page)
Step 3: Configure a Product to be used as a Template
Add a single product with a price that will be used as your product template.
- Go to WP eStore -> Add / Edit Products
- Specify the Product Name (the product name doesn’t matter as it will be dynamically changed to the alt text of the image)
- Specify the price (the same price will be used for all images in a gallery)
- Add variations such as shipping etc (optional)
- Save the Product (scroll to bottom of config page)
- Note the Product ID which will be our template ID (ID is automatically generated by WP eStore)
Step 4: Specify the Template Product ID in WP eStore
Now specify the product ID to be used as a template.
- Go to WP eStore -> Settings
- Go to the 3rd Party Integration tab
- Enter the product ID to be used as a template
- Update your settings (scroll to bottom of config page)
Step 5: Displaying the Gallery with Buy Now Buttons
Righto... at this stage we can display the gallery in a post or page with Buy Now Buttons.
- Add the NextGENGallery shortcode to your post / page using the NextGENGallery shortcode button.
- Update the shortcode by adding "template=wp-eStore-auto" to it.
- Save your post / page.
Step 6: View your Gallery and Start Selling!
You're all set. Your Photo Store is now online and selling. Wasn't that easy!?
Summary
Here's a recap of what you need to sell your photos using WordPress:
- Your own WordPress Site (self-hosted WordPress installation)
- NextGENGallery Plugin - A free gallery plugin.
- WP eStore Plugin - WP plugin specifically designed to sell digital products. This plugin does everything you need to sell stuff online... you can sell much more than just photos.
- WP eStore NextGENGallery Addon - A free addon for WP eStore.
Questions / Problems?
Add your questions to the comments below and I'll help you.
Claim your WP eStore Bonus!
If you purchase WP eStore through our affiliate link, you will receive a special bonus from Blog Web Designer.
Bonus: You will receive our WordPress Tutorial Series Course - absolutely free (valued at $49).
How to Claim your Bonus:
- Visit THIS LINK to buy WP eStore. Make sure not to visit any other websites while following these steps.
- Purchase WP eStore.
- After payment, return back to this page.
- Fill out the Claim Your Bonus form with your order information. To confirm your identity as the buyer, please fill out the form from the same IP address you used to buy the plugin.
By Jason September 29, 2012 - 10:26 am
Wow! This is hands down the best video tutorial on selling photos from WordPress. Thank you for creating such a good quality tutorial.
PS: Thanks for the awesome bonus.
By Kirk October 1, 2012 - 5:04 pm
Glad you liked it Jason. I think this is the fastest and easiest way to sell photos from your WordPress site.
By Matthew September 29, 2012 - 6:18 pm
I never knew it would be so easy to sell photos from my WordPress site. I’m a motor sports photographer and after every track day, I have hundreds of photos to sell. This makes it so easy and fast, I’m setting up my new site right now to sell photos the way you have shown. Thanks!
By Kirk October 1, 2012 - 5:05 pm
Great! Hope you make some sales this week Matthew!
By Jim October 1, 2012 - 6:10 am
Great guide! I guess the only problem with selling photos on your own website, is the limit on traffic. If you’d sell them on, i.e shutterstock, you’d get more sales overall, which usually means more money, even if the price is lower.
By Kirk October 1, 2012 - 5:08 pm
Hi Jim, yes that’s true. This solution is more for pro and hobby photographers that have vast amounts of photos to sell after an event such as a wedding or sporting event. You can’t really put those photos on a stock photography site… it’s more directed to the guests / customers from the actual event that want to buy digital copies on the Monday for a few dollars each.
By Adam November 1, 2012 - 5:43 pm
Great tutorial. Thanks for posting it.
By Kirk January 11, 2013 - 6:12 pm
You’re welcome!
By Baytech Web Design November 12, 2012 - 10:08 pm
Awesome stuff….Thanks for taught step by step instructions for sell photos from WordPress.Really i got a good information and i would also share with my friends.
By Kirk January 11, 2013 - 6:13 pm
Thanks. I tried to create this tutorial with logical, easy to follow steps so you can’t go wrong.
By John November 19, 2012 - 10:53 pm
It’s amazing. Nature photography is my hobby so, now I can also sell my photo through the wordpress plugins. I just have to need more technical knowledge about the wordpress. The tutorial is awesome. Now I have to try this at home.
By Kirk January 11, 2013 - 6:15 pm
This is the quick and dirty solution when you need to sell heaps of photos… all at the same price. Some people really like it because you don’t need to add a new product for each individual photo that you want to sell on WordPress.
By Anonimo January 19, 2013 - 3:52 am
Does this method work for selling videos as well?
By Kirk January 19, 2013 - 8:22 am
Yes, you can sell videos using the WP eStore plugin. The setup is similar but I like to protect the videos with time expiring encrypted links from Amazon S3. Great idea for another tutorial.
By Ståle Gismervik March 8, 2013 - 1:57 am
Thanks for a great tutorial. I only have one problem/question. How can I stop people from clicking on the thumbnail and see the large picture and just download it for free?
I’ve set it up so that I can add it to cart, but nothings stopping anyone from just downloading the images for free…
By Kirk March 8, 2013 - 11:42 am
This is a quick and easy way to upload and sell hundreds of photos at a time (usually for sporting events or weddings etc). It is not meant to be 100% secure. I will cover an advanced secure method in another tutorial. Thanks for watching!
By Luis Cuesta March 17, 2013 - 11:04 pm
Hi Kirk,
I’m glad I found your tutorial. There’s a bunch of plugins out there but not so well explained for photographers. Coding is not our stuff !
I wanted to ask you, however, if you’ve found a solution to be able to sell one item in different sizes, which is a quite common need.
a 150×150 pix Photo ment for online purposes cannot be sold as expensive as a high resolution 7000×7000 for publicity or decoration.
I came across the image storage plugin http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/image-store/
but I can’t figure out how to install it. The instructions are quite insufficient, for me at least.
Thank you for your blogging work!
By Kirk March 22, 2013 - 2:20 pm
Hi Luis, I’ll soon be adding an advanced tutorial showing you how to sell photos with different resolutions.
By Brandon April 4, 2013 - 2:25 pm
Wonderful tutorial. Although I’m having a heck of a time figuring out how to use this bulk method while showing the viewer a smaller low res image, and allowing them to purchase and download a hi res image.
Any ideas?
By Kirk April 7, 2013 - 9:14 pm
Hi Brandon, this is only a quick solution that isn’t meant to be secure. My next advanced tutorial will cover how to do it securely.
By Bas April 5, 2013 - 7:50 am
Hello Kirk,
Great tutorial!! When do you make a new tutorial with more secure options (thumbs with watermark and download without or stop downloading the large gallery photo’s) Can’t wait to watch/read the new tutorials about selling photo’s with wordpress!
Many thanks for the tutorial!!
By Kirk April 7, 2013 - 9:15 pm
You’re welcome Bas!
By sunil April 13, 2013 - 8:45 pm
Thanx a lot for nice tutorial. This will be very much helpful as I am planning for a photo store to sell photos and images online.
By Kirk April 15, 2013 - 8:15 am
Great. Hope you can use it.
By Shelly April 18, 2013 - 10:17 am
How do you configure the download link? Great tutorial by the way!
By Kirk April 24, 2013 - 8:21 pm
Thanks Shelly. Using this method, all the download links are automatic.