This AI Company Wants to Pay You for Your Photos
In an era when artificial intelligence thrives on data, a new initiative is turning everyday photographers into paid collaborators, one original image at a time.
The Ronia Raw Photo Collection, hosted on the DataForce Community platform by TransPerfect, invites photographers across the United States to contribute unedited RAW images for use in training advanced computer vision and machine-learning systems. Rather than licensing or just stealing images, Ronia directly pays contributors for each accepted submission, a notable shift from traditional stock and microstock models that typically reward contributors via downstream royalties rather than upfront fees.
“We invite photographers, photo hobbyists, visual creators, and anyone passionate about photography to participate in our RAW Photo Collection project. Do you regularly capture high-quality photos in RAW format to expand your photo library? If the answer is yes, this project allows you to earn extra income by contributing your photos to the development of advanced AI and computer vision technologies. Your images can have a real-world impact beyond your personal library,” DataForce says.
Participants upload high-quality RAW photos that meet project guidelines, with compensation offered per accepted image. This pay-as-you-submit model has drawn attention for making dataset creation a more transparent exchange of value between collectors and a global AI ecosystem.
@dataforceai Your RAW photos are valuable, don’t let them sit in your gallery!
Notable for Photographer Compensation
Contributors receive a fixed amount for each approved photo rather than earning small royalties over time as images are licensed or sold. This contrasts sharply with traditional microstock photography platforms, where photographers typically earn modest royalties when customers download their images.
“You will receive $1.50 USD per each accepted photo. Participants may submit as many photos as they wish across all open categories. Please note that some categories may have submission limits, and once a category is filled, it will be closed. Submissions are accepted on a first-come, first-served basis,” DataForce says.
By contrast, on major microstock sites like Shutterstock, iStock, or Adobe Stock, royalty payments are structured as a percentage of the sale price and vary by license type, contributor tier, and platform policies. Contributors have reported typical earnings in the cents to dollars per download range, and many photographers earn only modest passive income unless they amass a very large portfolio. Average monthly earnings can be quite low for mid-tier portfolios, and some artists report earning only a few dozen dollars per month from hundreds or thousands of images online.
By comparison, Ronia’s project pays directly for the act of contributing, sidestepping the slow accumulation of micro-royalties and providing a straightforward rate for each qualified photo. For hobbyists or emerging photographers, this can feel like a more immediate and reliable way to receive value for their work, even if rates per image are modest and they are directly contributing to training AI models.
Inside the Company: TransPerfect’s Scale
The Ronia initiative sits within a much larger corporate ecosystem. TransPerfect, a privately held American language and technology services company founded in 1992, has grown into one of the world’s largest providers of translation, localization, and AI data solutions. According to recent company financials, TransPerfect reported annual billed revenues of about $1.23 billion, marking over three decades of consecutive growth and underlining the breadth of its business footprint.
What It Means for Photographers and the Industry
The Ronia project also exists in the context of a highly polarized public conversation about artificial intelligence. Some welcome AI for its potential to automate repetitive tasks, improve productivity, and create new creative possibilities. Others decry AI for producing sloppy or derivative outputs, threatening jobs, and raising ethical concerns around bias and intellectual property.
For contributors, Ronia and similar crowd-sourced image collection initiatives are part of a growing trend in which companies directly compensate individuals for raw data creation, whether images, audio recordings, text transcripts, or other media. This model contrasts with the long-standing stock photography paradigm, where contributors often place their work on agency platforms and rely on passive royalties that may take years to accumulate substantial income.
Critics of microstock note that oversupply, slim royalty rates, and competition from AI-generated content have depressed earnings for many photographers. In this landscape, direct-pay projects can be appealing for those seeking immediate compensation, though they may not replace traditional professional photography contracts or commercial licensing gigs that can yield higher fees. Photographers may also not want to contribute directly to training AI.
As artificial intelligence continues to evolve, so too will the economics of visual data. Projects like the Ronia Raw Photo Collection highlight a new frontier in how images are sourced, valued, and remunerated, offering both opportunities and questions about the future of photographic work in a data-driven world.
Image credits: Ronia Raw Photo Collection. Header photo licensed via Depositphotos.
