As a general rule, if you take quality photos, better than the ones your customers could take by themselves, you can feel comfortable selling them. However, there are specific advantages in both solutions and no one better than a company manager would be able to tell what would be best for your specific kind of business. Here are some of these advantages:
Why SELLING PHOTOS:
- A photo for sale is per definition a professional photo: a guarantee of quality. A souvenir picture is such a precious thing that most of your customers will be happy to pay a little extra for a quality photo, rather than getting a mediocre one for free
- By selling photos, your guides/photographers will be encouraged to dedicate more time and attention to their work, to produce better pictures and take better care of your customers
- The photo business can lead to some very serious profit: some of our most experienced clients manage to round up their monthly turnover by around 30-35% just with photo sales!
Why providing photos FOR FREE:
- If photos are available for free, the large majority of your customers will return to your website, to download theirs. The resulting increase of online traffic will gradually and significantly improve the search engine positioning of your website (SEO)
- Sharing and spreading around the photos of your tours/activities, with your logo on top and credits to your company is a powerful, full-fledged marketing strategy
- Should you not wish to engage into producing high quality photos, offering standard quality ones could be a valid alternative to stand out from your competitors and attract new customers
PS: it is as well possible to go for a
"hybrid" solution: sell the HIGH RESOLUTION version of each photo, while providing the WEB RESOLUTION version for free (HYBRID function). No need to say that if this function is activated, the system would make this happen automatically, without you needing to resize and upload photos twice.