Stock Photo Resources
pechos (120 points) | Wed, 2005-07-27 17:36Hello,
I have been this site out for about 3 months now and have to say I really like the community as a whole. Something similar to this has probably been posted in the past, but I was wondering what y'all use / think in regards to some of the more well known Stock Photo sites out there. I am a big fan of sites like Istock and to some degree absolutevision, because the price is right, but quite honestly I think a majority of the photos are close to crap and you are getting what you pay for. Istock being leaps and bounds better than absolutevision. Many of the people shots and there poses / expressions are bizarre, unnatural and just plain creepy.
Is there any happy median out there that anyone knows of. Of course I like most of the stuff places like Corbis produce, but you also pay a heavy price for it. Most of my clients would laugh if I asked them to spend that much on a photo (some expect sites alone for close to the cost of a couple Corbis photos); it's only a web site after all.
Anyway, rants aside, do you guys now of any stock houses that sit in between the Istock and Corbis?
Any insight is always appreciated.
Thanks!
do you know www.sxc.hu ? for me that is the best stockphoto site(it's totaly free)....
//Static
They rule. Too bad it gets really slow at peek hours.
Not too surprising though, really. I keep wondering how they pay for their servers & bandwidth... they must shift a huge amount of data every day. I'll have to remember to click on more ads when I'm there!
arvanadesign.com
Arvana
arvanadesign.com
Here's a list I found earlier:
http://www.pixelperfectdigital.com/
http://www.morguefile.com/
http://www.openphoto.net/
http://www.imageafter.com/
http://www.pdphoto.org/
http://www.stockvault.net/
But sometimes I don't find those useful because they don't capture the image that I want. I'd use istock if I don't find anything decent.
http://www.twinarrow.com
http://www.absolutvision.com
http://www.istockphoto.com
http://www.rubberball.com
Visit My Website!: - David Bailey - graphic artist - ONLINE PORTFOLIO -
Diggin' the rubber ball site, that was sort of what I was originally looking for. Seems to be in the middle of the Big guys and the Istocks both pricewise and quality / compositionally. Thanks.
Thanks for all the other ones as well guys!
www.dakeat.com
I second the sxc.hu website but also recommend IndexStock. I have tried many different stock photography websites and there seems to be, oddly, a flock of people that try to sell mediocre fake looking pictures in particular stock photography websites. I don't know how these people gravitate toward the same sites to sell these horrid photographic wretchednesses, LOL.
IndexStock has lots of diverse pictures while capturing the realness in the imagery that many other stock photography sites lack. sxc.hu is also a really good site with extremely large resolution images.
Furthermore, sxc.hu claims in their terms of use: "You may use any of the photos in our system free of charge for any commercial or personal design work if you obey the specified restrictions concerning each photo you download." Most of the pictures I have come across that I've wanted to use don't have any individual photo restrictions. What's more, sxc.hu offers fairly large images for the image preview. I've seen many that are up in the 2000x____ resolution range. They also don't have a logo or watermark etched into the picture. By far, that's the best free use, large image, and logoless gallery I've seen. However, they only have approximately 150,000 pictures, whereas IndexStock has 800,000 pictures. The price for IndexStock's IndexOpen subscription plan is $599 for six months with access to more than 700,000 pictures. I don't think sxc.hu has any subscirption services; the choice is yours.
http://www.indexstock.com
http://www.sxc.hu
The IndexOpen subscription offers over 70,000 images ... i.e., less than 1/10 of their image collection.
http://freefoto.com
British photography. They have useful pictures somtimes, depending on what you're looking for.
how aabout one for vectors ? I cant find any that have a sudo quality
workys --->> http://filmsandwich.com/
I haven't used it yet but I've browsed a little and they do have some nice professional images for dirt cheap...
http://www.bigstockphoto.com/
Since all the other links have been posted.
Thanks for the link, looks very interesting.
http://www.twinarrow.com
some of my faves...
http://www.fotosearch.com ...search 50 stock art places at once!
http://www.gettyimages.com
http://www.veer.com
http://www.inmagine.com and http://www.123rf.com are my favourite stock photography resources. A large collection of stock photos can be found from these two sites.
Photos.com has a flat rate where you download as much as you want within a time period (6months or a year) depending on which fee you pay. The photos are generally good to excellent - although there seems to be a lot of photos of Asians - not that there's anything wrong with that.
I like workbook I know they are not cheap but there photos are unreal. Just great photography. Rubberball is good to. oh yeah masterfile has pretty good shots
_______________________________
Design is all around us.
check out http://www.createsdesign.com
http://www.createsdesign.com/blog
Great photos by the way. Try it :)
I certainly use lots of the sites mentioned above (Veer, SXC, Morguefile etc). There is also a new professional service by the guys that created SXC called Stockxpert which has some really good quality shots and can cost only $1.
Also check out these website for a comprehensive list of photo sites and other resources. Will be interesting to see how many survive the onslaught of Getty's purchasing power.
http://www.designeducation.ca/
http://bluevertigo.com.ar
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http://mijlee.com
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My current favourite is http://www.totallyphotos.com - cheap and high quality.
For a good list you can see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stock_photography_archives