I am planning to write a future post on subscription versus pay as you go royalty free images and have been looking at the pricing of some of the different subscription services available. Have any of you used subscription (pay one fee and use any photos for a set period) based royalty free photos services?
I would love to have your imput for a future post. Please email me with your experience of subscription based services (along with your name and link to your site/blog) anyone whos info I use, I will credit with their name and link to their website. Thanks in advance.
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17 Comments
For webdesign I used to search for royalty free images to put on the design. There are a lot of royalty free images, but most of them you need to credit an amount of money in order to download it.
I was always thinking that royalty free picture means free picture. I was wrong. It only means that when you get the picture (either by paying for it or having it for free) you can do what you want with it without having to pay for royalties to the author.
I’m more of an sxc.hu user personally… Sorry!
I use iStockphoto, you buy your credits and your buy the images you want, that’s it
My current 2 favorties are:
1) luckyoliver.com
2) Flickr (yes, you read that right). There are tons of great work to be found when doing a commercial license search.
I could tell you from experience that the quality of images is substantially higher if you use a rights managed (not subscription or royalty free) service. especially if the images are for online use because the usage fee is pretty low and will be billed to the client anyway (and marked up at %100).
Justin, I’ve been designing professionally for 10 years and while I agree that rights managed can provide higher quality any benefits when using it for on-screen use is negligible. What Rights Managed will give you primarily: 1) exclusivity if you so choose and 2) perhaps a higher resolution file if you request it. But 95% of my client base isn’t going to pay upwards of $500 or more for just ONE rights managed photo. So you’re telling me you can mark that up 100%?!!! So one photo would cost the client $1000. Please! Even royalty-free is pricing itself out of the ballpark in a lot of my projects (I’m seeing $175 in cases for one photo). I’m not saying Rights Managed–I’ve purchased numerous from Getty through the years–doesn’t have its place but for a vast majority of small to medium sized businesses, the better of these alternative stock sites provide a good entry point for making their marketing tools (web or print) look pretty good.
hcabbos- Yes, I’m telling you;) although I do agree that if it’s not in the budget than you should find a different outlet. But sometimes clients look at the cost between a stock image and a photo shoot. Photo shoots can be very expensive. Also does this company want the same image that may one day show up in a herpes ad on their site (exclusivity)? There is a lot of research and client interaction involving finding a stock image, so the mark up is not ripping someone off. If they want to find an image, buy it and download they are always welcome. For some companies $1,000 is not that much money. It is rarely that much money though. Their are other rights managed sites that are not as expensive as corbis or getty. ex. Acclaim and Look
Well, I think the type of site Tara is looking for is subscription royalty free, like ,a href=”http://www.shutterstock.com”>Shutterstock. There is subscription vs. pay as you go, and there is rights managed vs. royalty free. You can have rights managed subscription, you can have royalty free subscription; same with the pay as you go, there is both rights managed and royalty free.
Mauritian Blog, I used to think the same thing! You’re not alone there!
hcabbos, I had a professor in school who is a stock photographer (as well as a professional photographer, as in photo shoots) and he uses Workbook Stock for his images. There are options there that allow people to buy rights for certain periods of time (1 year, 5 years, lifetime, etc) and he had one photo sell for $70,000 (lifetime rights). So I do believe some (albeit, very few!) clients will pay well for good photography.
Oops, link didn’t work (Tara, you need to get edit comments fixed!!) Shutterstock
Thats’ exactly what I meant Lauren, thanks for explaining
- Subscription images – pay one fee for a month (or more) and download any images (within limits) from the site in that period – Shutterstock photos.com etc
(Tara, you need to get edit comments fixed!!)
My hand is firmly slapped – and it’s added to my very long to-do list
Have you figured out why edit comments doesn’t work with your theme? I think I remember Ronald released a newer version because many themes were having problems.
To be honest Lauren I haven’t tried updating the edit comments – my brain has been firmly fixed on the weather pops and day to day design work.
Oh, sure! It would be nice to have it, but I totally understand. I have such a long list of things to update on my own blog, too… ugh!
Subscription services are OK but you very often end up with pages and pages of poor, dated or limited value images.
Whilst still within a years subscription with one image library I found I was using more and more images from stock libraries such as iStockPhoto and Big Stock Photo where you buy credits and download images according to how you need to use them. I found these to be much better value for money, especially when clients were supplying their own images (you know, the low-res pictures they found on the internet and can’t understand why you can’t use them for their corporate brochure!).
Its best to use these services in the morning (from the UK) because by late afternoon they become tediously slow.
However, if your client has enough in the budget its best to employ a professional photographer who can create the image with just the look and composition you need – it will save you hours of Photoshop work.
For some free high quality images take a look at Morgue File or I have heard that you can even use images from Flickr – just email the photographer first to get permission and a cost if you are working on a national campaign.
hi
morguefile.com is an excellent resource, it was recommended to me as an online resource by an exam board for an ICT course I teach. Pupils use it and I use it in my freelance work.