Affordable Royalty-Free Images
Posted by admin on Aug 14, 2009
By now the economy has managed to reach us all. As a result, many of us have begun looking toward more affordable royalty-free alternatives.
The three royalty-free sources I turn to when budget is the most important consideration are istockphoto.com, bigstockphoto.com and dreamstime.com in reverse order. All of the stock houses get their images from indepent photographers. I find that each has its advantages and I would like to go over them here.
istockphoto.com
istockphoto.com is by far the most popular royalty-free stock photography site. It has by far the best selection of images. I feel that the quality of the images at istockphoto.com is generally higher as well. One of the neatest features is the ability to manage and add to light boxes on the fly.
The biggest disadvantage of istockphoto.com is that the prices are constantly moving up. A couple years ago Getty Images purchased istockphoto.com in an attempt to compete in the affordable stock-photography market. Afterall, if you can’t beat em’ join em’–right? Since the purchase of istockphoto.com, prices have climbed at a brisk pace. In addition, they have begun to pressure photographers into exclusive arrangements.
bigstockphoto.com
I believe that bigstockphoto.com has the second largest selection out of the bunch. Occasionally, I will find images here that I can’t find at istockphoto.com. Personally, I also like the ability to provide up to 140 images per page of search results. Their prices have not risen at the rate of istock.
The disadvantages of this stock house is the selection and the search criteria. After speaking with a representative, I learned that boolean searches are not allowed. This means that I cannot conduct conditional searches such as “This term OR This term”. In such a case I would get results with both terms. I don’t like the gallery (lightbox) feature because to use it you have to leave your search results and go to the galleries page and then come back to use it. However, I do like the ability to check a bunch of images on a page and add them to the active gallery all in one shot.
dreamstime.com
This is usually the most affordable stock photography source. However, the pricing structure has change to include classes of images with the most popular class being more expensive. They have a really neat light box feature as well that allows you to view it’s contents while browsing. You can also collapse it if you would like.
I don’t find the quality of the images to be quite as good as istockphoto or bigstockphoto and the selection seems to be smaller than either of the other two sources.
Tips
If you hold down your command key (control key on the PC) and click on each of the page numbers that come back in the search results your browser will begin to load the pages future viewing.
Choose to view as many images per search page as possible and then tap the space bar to advance down the screen one full screen at a time.
Use lightboxes as much as possible, so you can make your final choices after you have finished viewing your search results.
Use a thesaurus to get synonyms of additional terms the image you are looking for might be under. You can also click on the image thumbnails within the results page to see other keywords the photographer used to describe his image. Use these keywords to help find additional and perhaps better images.
A few of the images have the ability to search for similar images. You may want to give it a try. The results may surprise you.
Next to the search field you may see a link for advanced searches. Click on it to see options for narrowing your results. It’s a great way to reduce the amount of time you spend searching for images.
Conclusion
I would love to get your feedback on this matter. If you have affordable stock photography sources that I ddn’t mention here, feel free to leave a comment and I’ll try to update the post. Thanks for reading.