How BlinkOrigin works
Finding photos, fast
Most stock sites make you wade through page after page of thumbnails. BlinkOrigin is built around filters: over a hundred categories, dozens of subcategories under each, author, price, time of day (morning, midday, night), colour or black & white, still or moving shots, and quality. Combine them and the page shows exactly what you asked for — nothing else. Thumbnails are pre-generated at upload, so browsing stays quick even on large result sets.
Licences — the listed price covers presentation use
Every photo's listed price buys the Standard — Presentation licence: websites, social media, presentations, editorial and standard print runs. Uses with mass exposure — billboards and outdoor advertising, television and broadcast, video and streaming productions — reach far bigger audiences, so they carry an extended licence at a multiple of the listed price (in line with industry practice across major stock libraries). The exact price of each licence is shown on the photo page before you buy, and your purchase history records which licence you hold for every image.
Credits — £1 equals 1 credit
You buy photos with credits. Top up in advance using Stripe's secure checkout, then each download is deducted from your balance. Your balance is always visible in the menu, and we warn you when it drops below £10 worth so you're never caught short mid-project. Your purchase history — with permanent re-download links — lives in your account.
Authors earn 70% of every sale
When someone buys your photo, 70% of the sale is yours. The remaining 30% covers the platform's operational costs — storage, bandwidth, payment processing and development. Earnings accrue against every sale and are paid out monthly.
Payments go through Stripe — we never hold your card or bank details
Both sides of the money flow run on Stripe, a regulated payment provider used by millions of businesses:
- Buying credits: you pay on Stripe's own hosted checkout page. Your card number never touches BlinkOrigin's servers and is never stored by us — Stripe confirms the payment and we add the credits.
- Author payouts: you set up your own free Stripe account and link it in your BlinkOrigin account page. Each month we pay your 70% share directly to that Stripe account, and Stripe forwards it to your bank. Your bank details live with Stripe, not with us.
That separation is deliberate: the platform holding no card or bank data is the strongest protection we can give you.
Copyright protection built in
Every full-size view is watermarked in memory — the clean file simply never reaches the browser. Buyers (and the author) download the clean original; everyone else sees "Copyright (C) Helium22 - Blink Origin" tiled across the image. Every photo also carries a permanent ID assigned at upload that never changes, so a licensed image can always be traced back.
Image content
BlinkOrigin is a curated library, and every upload is reviewed by an administrator before it goes live. We accept photography that is your own original work — or work you hold full rights to — including any model or property releases needed for recognisable people, private property, trademarks or artwork. Honest editing (exposure, colour, cropping, retouching) is welcome. We do not accept images you don't own or that infringe someone else's copyright or trademark; content that is unlawful, hateful, defamatory or invades a person's privacy; sexually explicit material; imagery that glorifies violence or self-harm; or misleading content presented as genuine. Submissions that fall short are declined with a reason, and repeated violations close the account. The full rules are set out in our Terms & Conditions.
A hand with the tagging — but the last word is yours
Classifying a photograph against 104 categories and every subcategory and tag beneath them is real work, and it is the part that makes authors give up halfway. So when you upload, you can press Suggest criteria from my photo and the site will read the image and tick the boxes it believes apply — categories, subcategories, tags, time of day, and whether the shot is colour or black and white.
The point of it is speed. Tagging a single photograph properly can take longer than taking it did, and that is what stops most people building a library worth selling from. Detection turns that into a glance and a correction, so a batch of 20 can be classified in the time it used to take to do two or three. Your work reaches the library — and buyers' searches — the same day rather than sitting on a memory card waiting for an evening you never quite find.
Nothing is decided for you. Every suggestion arrives as a ticked box, marked so you can see at a glance which choices were made for you and which were yours. Untick anything that is wrong, add whatever was missed, and only then upload — the criteria that are saved are the ones showing on screen when you press the button. If you would rather not use it at all, ignore it and tick everything yourself; the form works exactly as it always did.
Please do check it. It is a well-read assistant, not an expert on your photograph. It recognises what an image looks like, not what you meant by it, and it can miss the very thing that makes a shot worth licensing. Time of day is the clearest example: where your camera recorded when the shutter opened, we use that and it is reliable; where it did not, the answer is inferred from the light in the frame and is only a guess — an overcast morning and a late afternoon can look much the same. Accurate criteria are what make your work findable, and buyers reach photographs through filters, so a wrong tick costs you sales.
How it works in practice: your photograph is sent to a specialist image-recognition service for analysis and is not kept by it. This happens only when you press the button, only to the first photograph in a batch, and never automatically. Nothing is stored on BlinkOrigin at that point either — no photo record exists until you complete the upload.
Selling your photos
- Register (opening soon) — you'll get a 32-character recovery key by email and set up authenticator-app sign-in.
- Upload up to 20 photos at a time and tick the criteria they belong to — the same filters buyers search with, plus your own comma-separated tags. If you'd like a head start, let the site suggest them from the photograph and correct whatever it gets wrong.
- Set your price in credits. You can change any detail later except the photo's permanent ID.
- Link your Stripe account and get paid monthly.