If you’re interested in starting an online business selling artwork, you may have considered selling photo prints online. Possibly Etsy or maybe some other platform. Long gone are the days when people had to go into a brick and mortar store to purchase a poster for the home or office.
Now it’s as easy as going online to find a poster you like, paying, and printing. That’s it. Of course, it’s easier to send it to a printer when the print is large and the quality may be much better, but you get what I’m saying. A customer can have it pretty quickly. So why not be the one to provide the masses with these prints? Not sure it’s do-able? Keep reading! This guide to making money with free photos may surprise you.
Can You Sell Digital Art Prints On Etsy?
If you search Etsy right now you’ll see there are over 7 million art prints listed there. 7 million! And yes, they are selling. There are so many different styles, sizes, and purposes that there’s definitely space for yours.
Art prints encompass everything from bathroom wall decor to children’s bedroom wall art to office prints. The sky is the limit. The key (as it is with selling anything on Etsy) is to find a niche that gets lots of traffic with less competition.
This isn’t always easy and to be honest, with certain items you’ll just have to deal with the competition to sell what you want. That’s okay though, because as long as you optimize your listings with great photos and carefully selected tags and titles, you can still make lots of sales
How Do You Sell Art Prints Online?
The best thing to do first is to decide what type of art prints you’d like to sell in general. Do you want to make cardboard signs for weddings? Lawn birthday signs? Vintage posters? Decide what type of sign you think you’d be interested in making and then try to narrow down your audience. Go to Etsy and put in the type of art you’d like to make and see what comes up.
Let’s see how we can do this..
Let’s say for the sake of this post that we want to sell vintage city posters. In this picture you’ll see a search I did for Vintage Miami Poster. There are 137 search results. This could be a great niche with little competition, but are people really looking for this type of art?
After a quick search I can see that there are sales. After doing a deeper search I can also see that many of the items are in people’s carts. That’s a great way to see whether there is real interest in a product.
This item alone has been favorited by Etsy users over 100 times and the shop has made over 12,000 sales! For a photo that the seller may or may not have taken themselves. That part doesn’t matter so long as the print is great quality.
Now that we have an idea of what we can sell, we can move onto the next step.
Prepare Digital Photo Prints For Download
If you take photos yourself you probably know how to enlarge your prints. Once you’ve created photos in the desirable size all you’d have to do is work out a way to duplicate your prints and make arrangements to ship to your customers. You can also scan your photographs to sell them as digital prints. If you’re not able to scan them yourself you can find a scanning service to digitize the prints for you.
What If you’re not a photographer? Will you have to take an intro photog class to learn how to take quality photos? No, you really don’t. If you want to be able sell unique photos that you can take pride in because they’re yours, I will always encourage more education, but if you just want to make money now selling prints, it’s not necessary.
We’ll continue with the photo example but there are many different types of prints that you can sell.
Free Stock Images
There are many sites out there where you can either purchase or just download images that can be sold. The main thing is to understand licensing, which is what protects these images and their creators. Before you download an image you want to make sure the image comes with a commercial license that allows you to sell the image as-is or a public domain, or common creatives license that also allows you to sell an image as your own.
You have to be sure to abide by the terms of the license or be at risk of being sued by its creator or worse, having your store shut down for copyright infringement.
Here you can find a list of websites offering stock photos along with lots of other resources for content creators.
Get a list of websites offering FREE royalty free photos and more!
Rawpixels is a website that offers tons of public domain images that you can sell on whatever platform you’re on.
As you can see, the works labeled creative commons on this site are free for the taking. All you have to do is download the size and format you’d like.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art offers artwork under its open access policy that can be sold commercially as well. This picture of the Panthenon can be downloaded and sold as you wish! If you’re interested in selling prints these two websites are a must-see!
Is Selling Photo Prints On Etsy Profitable?
The short and very vague answer is, it can be. If you select prints that people are interested in purchasing and present your products in a way to that will catch their attention, you very well can make this a profitable business. I can have the most beautiful print but if nobody knows about it, it won’t make any money.
One of the benefits of selling digital prints is being able to sell with very little overhead. Another is the ease in which you can deliver them to your customers.
Imagine listing a photo one time and making sales over and over again without you having to do anything. This is why digital art is so popular on Etsy. If you want to start an Etsy shop visit here.
Common Art Print Sizes
Once you’ve decided you want to sell prints you’ll have to decide what sizes you want to offer. You can just offer it in one size or many, it’s up to you. Just keep in mind that you open yourself up to more potential sales with more options. The sizes I offer most often are the following because it’s easy for people in the US to find frames off of the shelf.
- 5×7 inches
- 8×10 inches
- 11×14 inches
- 16×20 inches
Standard international paper sized frames are the following, so if you anticipate making sales in countries outside of the US, you may want to consider creating these sizes as well:
- A5
- A4
- A3
Another option is to create sizes based on their ratio. If you create a file for the largest size your customer can print a smaller version without losing quality. When you take a small file and try to enlarge it you can lose quality so it’s always better to go from larger to smaller.
If you want to offer art that can easily be resized, you can create the largest file and let customers know they can resize to one of the smaller files with the same ratio.
Standard Art Print Sizes
- (RATIO 4:5) for printing 4″x5″, 8″x10″, 16″x20″, 40x50cm
- (RATIO 3:4) for printing 6″x8″, 9″x12″, 12″x16″, 18”x24″
- (RATIO 2:3) for printing 4″x6″, 6″x9″, 8″x12″, 10″x15″, 12″x18″, 16″x24″, 20″x30″, 24″x36″, 60x90cm
- (INTERNATIONAL PAPER SIZE) for printing 5″x7″, A5, A4, A3, A2, A1, 50x70cm
- For printing 11”x14”
- Maybe an image formatted for a square frame as well (1:1 ratio or 1000px x 1000px for example).
Unique Photo Prints
If you want to see whether your image has been sold on Etsy or posted anywhere, you can use a free website called Tin Eye. Simply upload your image (under 10 MB) and voila! Tin Eye will tell you where that picture may be found online. Very cool if you want to make sure you’re not selling images that appears in 20 other stores.
As you can see from this image from Rawpixel, someone is selling products using this image on Redbubble. I would refrain from uploading my own designs with this art unless I alter it a little, making it unique.
In conclusion, I do think that you can sell art prints on Etsy or some other platform and make money. Check out the sites above and check out their images. Then go to Etsy and type the image into the search bar to see what comes up.
Or try googling “creative commons art” or “public domain art” and see what comes up. This offers us an almost endless amount of possibilities. So what will you create with this art?
I almost forgot, if you’re selling printables, be sure to use quality mockups for your art! It makes all the difference in the world. Creative Fabrica has great options for every size print.
Try This for Delivering Your Digital Prints!
