Pictorama app lets writers sell their smartphone photos

[UPDATED ON 9/19/2012 — I’ve added info about pricing based on additional details from the company. — MVR]

If you use your phone to take photographs for blog posts or stories, here’s a way to potentially earn a couple extra bucks for your efforts.

A German company has created an iPhone app called Pictorama that lets people sell their photographs on an online marketplace. Think of it as a mashup of Instagram and Etsy.

The process sounds simple: download the app to your iOS device and install it. Take a picture, then tag it with a few descriptive keywords and upload it to the site. Pictorama’s in-house experts and community members will rate the photo and if it’s approved, it’ll be posted on the online marketplace for sale.

“We believe that our app would be particularly interesting to people who travel and take pictures in many different areas,” company co-founder Richard Klatt shared in a note to me introducing the software.

So far, pictures are selling for an average of $3 to $6, Klatt says. “Soon all pictures will be offered for something between $5-$10,” he says.

Once you sell a photo, you can collect payment by going to “My Account” and “My Sales” and submitting a payout request via Paypal. Payments are only available once your sales total at least $5.

As an incentive, Pictorama is paying 25 cents per image for the first 25,000 images that an individual uploads, whether anyone buys them or not. I have no idea what professional photographers get when they sell images to stock photo libraries, but 25 cents per image doesn’t sound like much. Still, if you have an enormous backlog of pictures from a trip or event, they could be worth tens, hundreds or thousands of dollars.

In an upgrade that happened this week, the app now lets users see pictures that other people are uploading, “like” them and leave comments.

Watch this 1:19 minute video for more on how the app works: