Going through old photos is making me money through COVID-19

I think most photographers out there have a hard drive or two… or in my case 15… that is full of their content that they’ve ever shot. Sometimes we might look to our first one and cringe so hard of embarrassment at our teenage edgy “Woe be me” photoshoots thinking we’ll change the world with our emo photoshoots named after songs. Just me? Damn.

As the pandemic had settled in, I started going through my old hard drives, reminiscing about shoots and memories in general. I found I actually had a hell of a lot of photos that I just never edited that, in fact, could be earning me some money. So I set myself a task of going through them all, each folder, each file and re-editing began. I’m only through 3 hard drives so far.

I started submitting through the months, as of today 54 are on reserve but I know that some were also reserved, then dropped, then re-reserved but some have just dropped, so it was more at some point and hell they might have sold for all I know!

54 reserves on those images so far. That’s a lot of money I potentially hadn’t made!

Have any other photographers out there been doing similar? Have any re-edits made you any money yet? I’d love to know! Do any photographers out there want to start making some passive income whilst being paid really well for it?