Royalty Free Images - Subscription or Pay as you Go?
Written by Tara: Freelance Designer on Monday, 22 of October , 2007 at 10:20 am
As a designer I probably use photo library sites a few times a week. What is great nowadays is that most images only cost a few dollars/pounds and some are even free, affordable enough to be used in visuals as wells as finished artwork. I have on several occasions looked into the possibility of joining an image subscription site, but as yet have not found one that I feel offers a worthwhile options as compared to pay as you go. I decided to have another look round to see if there had been any improvement in subscription based royalty free image sites compared to pay as you go web sites.
Pay as you go Royalty Free Images
I think Getty Images has some really stylish looking royalty free images but unfortunately at £200 - £300 an image this is often too much for smaller clients especially the more computer savvy ones who have an awareness of the cheaper photo sites.
Istockphoto
Istockphoto must be one of the most well know of the cheaper royalty free image sites, I probably started using their images about 3 years ago, when there were significantly less images and the quality of images really varied. Prices of images vary from 50p - £7.50 ($1-$15) and there is a large selection of images including vector, photos, flash and video. I have to admit istockphoto is always my first port of call when I am looking for inexpensive images.
Fotolia
Fotolia claim to have 2,539,873 stock images online and is one of the secondary sites that I look at for images. Images cost from £1 - £3 ($2 to $6)
Big Stock Photo
Big Stock Photo is a website I use occasionally. They claim to have over 1,457,000 stock photos to search from from 50p - £1 ($1 - $2). In the past I have found their site a little slow, but hopefully this has now improved. One of the things a bit different about Big Stock Photo to many other royalty free photo sites is with a standard license they allow you to use their images in web templates.
Pay as you go and Subscription
123RF
If I can’t find what I am looking for at istockphoto 123 Royalty free is usually my next stop. 123 Royalty Free claim to have over a million images, not as many images as istockphoto I am sure but I quite often find something here small images from 60p to high resolution at £1.80. 123 Royalty free also offer a subscription service (some images are limited to subscribers only) but I find their packages a little odd. They have a basic subscription plan for £49 ($98) a month but this only allows you to download a maximum of 5 images a day. I don’t know about you but when I am working on a design job and need images, chances are I will need more than 5 images on one day. If this was changed to be a maximum amount of images a week (35 images a week) or on a monthly limit I would definitely be more interested and I think others would be too. A premium subscription plan costs £129 ($158) month which allows you to download up to 26 images a day.
Subscription Photo libraries
As I said before I currently don’t use subscription based services so I can only tell you of the sites I have found. Please feel free to leave a comment with your opinion on any of the royalty free services you have used.
Photos.com
Photos.com claim to have 350,000 professional quality stock photographs. Flicking through some of the pics they look like they have been shot by professional photographers but some look a little cheesy, especially some of the corporate ones. The subscription prices seem pretty reasonable at $99.95 per month which allows you to download up to 250 pics a day.
Liquid Library
Liquid Library claims offer unlimited access to over 100,000 exclusive, high-resolution royalty-free images. I months subscription is $199.95. Like photos.com some of the images look a bit cheesy to me, but this could just be the searches I tried.
Ablestock
Able Stock claim to offer 120,000+ High-Res Images & Photo Objects. The photos at Able Stock look OK and 1 months subscription is $229.95
Jupiter Images Unlimited
Jupiter images unlimited definitely seems t give you a choice of images from several different image collections including Ablestock and Photos.com (mentioned above) but you do have to pay a premium for the choice of £729 per month. This would perhaps be worthwhile for an agency but far too much for a freelancer like myself
Shutterstock
Two graphic design blog readers who both use Shutterstock have been kind enough to share their experience of the subscription service:
Lauren from Creative Curio says:
I use Shutterstock at work. It’s a little expensive, in my opinion, at $199/mo (cheaper per month if you commit to a longer subscription), but you do get up to 25 image downloads/day. The resolutions range from about 800×600 at 72ppi to “Super,” which are 20+ inches wide at 300ppi, all for the same price (there is no “credit” system where some images are worth more credits than others and you get x credits/day). We have been downloading as many images as we can each day, even if we don’t have a specific purpose for them yet. We download generic things like abstract backgrounds, photos of business people, cute animals, stuff like that.I don’t think they have as wide of a selection as some other sites I’ve looked at, like Masterfile (although Masterfile says they only have about 1.3 million RF images, while Shutterstock boasts over 2.4 million). I have never subscribed to Masterfile, though, so I can’t comment on that. Overall, I would say I like Shutterstock, but I’ve not had experience with any other subscription stock photo sites.
Chris Coyier from CSS Tricks says:
Personally I am a fan of Shutterstock. It’s 200 bucks a month (with discounts if you buy multiple months). I buy it one month at a time when I need a shot for something. I charge clients for stock photography, and most of them are more than happy to pay $200 for great images on a project. So it pays for itself with one project a month, and everything after that is gravy. I try to remember to pop in there as many times as I can during the month and grab nice looking stuff I think I may be able to use later to make the most out of every month.
Advantages:
Great selection
Good search
Lots of vector
Fairly inexpensive
Lots of nakedness, also potential disadvantage =)
Little annoyances:
Many images have little restricted rights still (like images of sporting stadiums and such)
You have to enter a CAPTCHA for every download
Large images have to “generate”
The super-high resolution images are obviously just upscaled and need to be reduced a bit anyway.
You are limited in number of downloads per day (25 I think)
Lots of nakedness, also potential advantage
Conclusion
For me I think for now I will stick with pay as you go images for my graphic design work. I generally spend between £50 to £100 ($100 - $200) and although this would pay for a subscription at some of the sites it would then have to be my only image source. This is fine if the photo site has everything you need but I know this will not always be the case. For design companies or freelancers who spend more on royalty free images it would perhaps be a more attractive option.
Also see www.abouttheimage.com which has a breakdown of subscription photo sites.
Category: General Graphic Design
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Pingback by Image libraries « CGInspiration
Made Monday, 22 of October , 2007 at 2:58 pm
[…] Women in Games Image libraries October 22nd, 2007 Graphic Design Blog has a nice post about various sources for images, comparing subscription vs. pay-as-you-go services. As you know, […]
Comment by matt
Made Monday, 22 of October , 2007 at 4:37 pm
The company that I work for uses Jupiter Images Unlimited, and its great. Definitely not for the individual freelancer because of the price, but if you can afford it I would definitely say go with that one.
We used to use Liquid Library but it wasn’t all that great.
Comment by Tara: Freelance Designer
Made Monday, 22 of October , 2007 at 6:41 pm
Hi Matt
Thanks for your input on Jupiter Unlimited and Liquid Library.
Comment by LaurenMarie - Creative Curio
Made Monday, 22 of October , 2007 at 8:25 pm
Wow, that’s an extensive list of sites! Thanks, Tara! Going to add this to del.icio.us for sure. How funny that the two people who emailed you about their experiences both use the same subscription site! Well, at least readers will know Shutterstock is pretty reliable.
Comment by Justin (pusha)
Made Tuesday, 23 of October , 2007 at 6:32 am
I’m surprised you didn’t mention Corbis. It is second only to Getty containing around 70 million images. But yes, it’s expensive. I personally feel that in most cases with photography, you get what you pay for.
Comment by Louisa Nicholson
Made Tuesday, 23 of October , 2007 at 11:35 am
Thanks for posting the abouttheimage link - VERY extensive breakdown of all the plans available.
I personally do pay-as-you-go but if I were still freelance I too would do a monthly subscription and download as many as I could! Thanks for the article!
Comment by Tara: Freelance Designer
Made Tuesday, 23 of October , 2007 at 11:40 am
Hi Lauren
Thanks for your input on this one. I had been holding off on posting this for a while as i was waiting for some onfo from another reader, but I guess they have been too busy. Next time I need some images I will take a look at Shutterstock to see if they would have what I needed.
Hi Justin, I think you are right you do get what you pay for, but saying that there are some good pics on the cheaper sites they are just mixed in with some not so good ones. Unfortunately if you need several pictures the priced of the likes of Getty and Corbis is too much for smaller clients.
Comment by Graham :: Map Maker
Made Wednesday, 24 of October , 2007 at 2:04 pm
iStockphoto for me every time,
I did have a subscription with liquid library but there was a lot of dated and predictable ‘Tat’ in the library that boosted the number of images available. With the new pay as you go image libraries like iStockphoto you can buy some really useful images and if you contribute to the library either with images or illustrations you can earn a little money on the side as well.
The bigger libraries like Getty Images are great for news and sporting events but your client will need to agree to the cost of purchasing images beforehand.
Pingback by Links of Interest - CSS-Tricks
Made Friday, 26 of October , 2007 at 10:50 am
[…] has a post up over on the Graphic Design Blog about the different royalty free image subscription services. I weighed in on my experience using […]
Comment by EvE
Made Wednesday, 31 of October , 2007 at 10:10 pm
I think you all should know that Glowimages has worked out wonderfully for me in the past. I have been in the design business for a couple of years now and I stumbled upon them by accident. They are fast, super friendly and they have a huge library with an easy to navigate site. They are mainly royalty free and I like how it seems that everytime I go to the site, there are new images. Sometimes I like to get away from the corporate big guys and remember how it feels to not listen to a recording. Eh, that’s just me. Check em’ out
http://www.glowimages.com/
Comment by Rachel Goldstein
Made Tuesday, 20 of November , 2007 at 7:06 pm
Great post - here is another list of free stock photography … http://allgraphicdesign.com/graphicsblog/2007/09/16/huge-list-of-free-stock-photos-on-the-net/
Thanks..Rachel
Comment by LaurenMarie - Creative Curio
Made Thursday, 13 of December , 2007 at 12:51 am
Tara, I just thought I’d give my feedback about Getty Image’s subscription services. I would say it’s not worth it.
The usability of the service is wretched. The experiences my coworkers and I are having is frustrating to say the least!
The service is very, very tricky, almost deceptive. They hide the subscription stuff so deep in the site it’s a miracle if you can find it! It’s actually not even on the main gettyimages.com (so if you were looking at those RF images and thinking “Wow! I should sign up!” ha… think again), the subscription images are only on the legacy site: legacycreative.gettyimages.com. Then when you are searching (even if you access this page through your user profile where is says Click Here to Access Subscription Images), you must be sure to check the box that says Subscription Images Only; it’s not enough to just check the Royalty Free box. The subscription images are even more limited than those!
It’s just been a completely horrible experience. None of the sales reps told us anything about this, they didn’t even tell us how to use the service and for a day or two we were stumped at how to download things. And we just committed to a one year subscription for $2,000. Oops.
Comment by Tara: Freelance Designer
Made Thursday, 13 of December , 2007 at 10:25 am
HI Lauren,
Thanks for reporting back about Getty image’s subscription service, you would expect a lot better service when you are paying that sort of money. I would have thought Getty would realise they need to be a bit more competitively priced or offer a really good service. I hate stuff that’s hidden in small print.
Comment by EvE
Made Thursday, 13 of December , 2007 at 6:16 pm
It is definitely true about Getty site, things are alittle bit tricky, you kind of have to be a master to navigate through it. Like I said previously, sometimes, the big guys lose their personal touch and I get frustrated easily so I usually end up calling the 800 numbers. Service is very important. For the money, Glowimages is worth it.
Comment by LaurenMarie - Creative Curio
Made Thursday, 13 of December , 2007 at 8:10 pm
The other disappointing thing about the Getty subscription is that although it says “Print Resolution” images, they are only 4″ x 6″ at 300 ppi. Tiny! What if you only want to use a section of that image? Suddenly your 4×6 is 2×3! They should at least offer images at a size we can use with full page ads in magazines.
I’m starting to realize just how good Shutterstock is now. Perhaps the quality of their photography isn’t as high as others, but there is no BS about what you get and you can download very large files without any extra cost.
EvE, I checked out Glow but I didn’t see a subscription service option. Is there one?