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.
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.
- 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.