Fine Art America is one of many options on the web for sharing and selling art. Their platform provides a great visual experience for shoppers, lets you set your own prices, and connects you with potential buyers around the world.
What is Fine Art America?
Fine Art America is an online art community built to connect artists and collectors. When an artist posts their work it becomes searchable to everyone who visits their website. They also offer options for artists to create their own website or embed a gallery and shopping cart into their own site.
Free vs. premium
Fine Art America offers both free and premium accounts. The free account is a great way to get started, but you’ll likely find yourself subscribing to the modestly priced premium account (just $30/year) if you want to have more than 25 images for sale.
A premium account also opens up a few additional options such as creating your own website or using their widgets to embed their browsing and shopping experience into your own website. You’ll also have access to premium marketing tools like creating email campaigns.
Your photos on a wide variety of media
For photographers, Fine Art America offers a variety of media for prints and products. You can choose to stick with prints and wall art or expand into greeting cards, coffee mugs, and much more.
All of Fine Art America’s products are manufactured with premium materials and are backed with a 30-day satisfaction guarantee.
Setting up for success with Fine Art America
There are a few things to consider as you get up and running with Fine Art America that will save you time and set you up for success.
Prepare your photos
Before you upload your photos, take a few moments to update your metadata with an appropriate title and keywords. I usually do this in Mylio or Lightroom Classic before exporting my images as full-resolution JPGs. When your photos are uploaded these fields will be automatically populated from your photo’s metadata.
Define your Fine Art America default upload settings
Before uploading your first photos, make sure you take a few minutes to adjust your default image settings (under Account > Settings > Default Settings). This is where you set your prices and choose which items you want to make available.
When you’re done, make sure you click the Save Changes button at the bottom of the page. This will set the prices for all new images you upload.
Final thoughts
Fine Art America has several features I like, and it is a great value for the price, but it isn’t perfect. Here are a few of my favorite things, and things that I’d like to see improved.
Things I love about Fine Art America
- Easy for customers/buyers to use
- Built-in tool to visualize my photos on a wall
- Hands-off print fulfillment
- Can be inserted into my WordPress website
- Surprisingly affordable (Premium $30/year)
Improvements I’d like to see
- A more intuitive back end interface for artists — The current layout is clumsy and difficult to navigate.
- Documentation — There is surprisingly little available from Fine Art America in the way of help or documentation on how to navigate and best set up your profile. Most of the answers I found were from third-party sources while searching the web.
- A more efficient Upload Tool. The current tool limits artists to uploading 5 images at a time.
- More customization options for Widgets. The Fine Art America widget works relatively well on my WordPress site but is very limited in customization. I’d love to change the font and easily choose which Collection is displayed.
Fine Art America is a solid choice for photographers who want to sell their photography online. The customer experience is great, and it offers a variety of tools to help photographers and artists maximize their sales.
Definitely an easy site to use. I’ve been using FAA for almost 10 years and unfortunately never sold an image. I’ve had both the paid and now dropped down to the free version and changed images and keywords. Not giving up as I do know others who earn a bit using it, just not sure what I’m doing wrong.
Thanks for your comment, Pam! So sorry to hear that FAA hasn’t been a great investment for you. It is a saturated and competitive market and I’ve found that the more effort I put into marketing my work, be it through social media or other in-person sales events, the more success I have.
What type of marketing efforts do you recommend for success on Fine Art America?
Thank you!
Hi Angela. I found your page by googling uploads and FAA. I think the last time I looked at FAA, I didn’t see that the images uploaded would take metadata in the keyword and title fields. Does it now also take descriptions too? I hate the 5 image at a time upload tool as I have 50,000 images to upload. I currently have 125,000 images on an agency where I mostly sell rights managed licenses, but also personal prints. In the last three months, I have sold an average of 22 image downloads for personal prints. These are almost entirely… Read more »
Hi Brian – Thank you for your comment! As long as you have embedded the keywords, title, and description into your metadata, FAA can read it. I, too, find the 5 image limit to be frustrating. However, I think they do that to discourage people from posting every image they’ve ever made and forcing them to focus on uploading their best. It sounds like you’re getting good results with your agency. With FAA, success really depends on how much time you put in to marketing your work. I suggest giving FAA a try in addition to selling through your agency.… Read more »
FineArtAmerica, in my opinion, provides a wide range of art, artists, and services at reasonable pricing. In fact, I’ve brought a few other art-loving friends to the site, and they appreciate it as well.
Hi , do you know how to change the artist name once you have set up the profile. I used my first name John but wanted to use another. I’ve looked under profile but couldn’t see how to do it . Thanks