Stock Photos

Top Stock Photo Sites for Novice Designers, Writers, and Artists

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Finding the right stock photography site to purchase your images from is no walk in the park. It involves a lot of time and effort to make sure you don’t end up with overused content. Hiring photographers may be the best option, but it can be expensive and time-consuming. Creative Commons does not help either as they may come with legal liability. If you are a novice designer, writer, artist, download images from reputable stock photo websites to ensure high quality and avoid legal issues. Read more here.

For starting designers, writers, artists who want to stand out from the competition without breaking the bank, we recommend the following stock photo sources:

  • PHOTOCASE

    The artsy stock photography website from Berlin is one of the best niche and trendy stock photo agencies in the market. They have over 500,000 images in their library, filled with unique and very distinctive stock photos. Photocase also has a special collection of artistic, extraordinary, and rare photos. You can find stock images with unconventional models, out of the box concepts, and non-posed shots that can make your project stick out from the competition.
  • DRAGONIMAGES
    DragonImages is a stock photography website based in Asia. They produce regionally specialized stock images, perfect if you are looking for high quality, professional photos that represent the Asian culture and people. They add adversity to the large pool of stock photo collections available. Their super low prices make them one of the best places to download stock images if you are new to the creative industry.
  • TONL
    TONL brings diversity to the stock photo industry through accurate representations of the real world we live in. They have a small yet varied library filled with authentic, natural-looking images of models from various racial heritages and cultural backgrounds. Their plans and pricing are also affordable, which help many starting creatives and businesses with small budgets.

If you are a starting creative with a limited budget, that doesn’t mean you can’t get high-quality images to enhance your projects. The following list of stock photo sites offer unlimited stock photography at super affordable prices:

  • STORYBLOCKS

    Storyblocks is a stock media platform that specializes in unlimited download plans. They have over 400,000 images in their collection, all of which you can download for an affordable price. Aside from 100% royalty-free content, you can also enjoy fresh content, unbeatable savings, and unlimited use. If you need tons of photos all the time, this is one of the best stock photo resources for you.
  • ENVATO ELEMENTS
    Although relatively new to the creative industry, Envato Elements host several marketplaces specializing in specific media types. They have a curated collection of over 630,000 content that you can access with a subscription plan. You can enjoy unlimited downloads from the entire collection for only $29 a month.
  • STOCKUNLIMITED
    StockUnlimited is a stock photography website that offers unlimited downloads of illustrations and vectors. They have over 1 million visuals, including stock photos, audio files, and fonts. You can download them for a very low price. Nine dollars for 10 downloads is an excellent deal to get all kinds of media you need for your project.

If you are a starting designer, writer, or artist, unlimited downloads and very low prices are all you need to create remarkable projects. While you can get all these from Creative Commons and public domains, these stock photo resources are not reliable. You can end up violating copyright laws, which may tarnish your reputation as a creative. It is still best to purchase the right license to protect you from legal issues that may arise down the road.

Copyright infringement is a severe offense in the creative industry. A stock image needs to have the right license for you to be able to use it legally. Creative Commons license is not applicable for commercial use. Thus, you need to download your startup stock photos from reputable stock image sites. You can use royalty-free and rights-managed images from the above photography sites in various projects, including social media and blog posts.

 

 

Are Royalty-Free Stock Images Really Free?

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5 stock agencies

Are royalty-free stock images really free? That the question many people tend to ask. What is royalty-free mean? What does free mean? The answer lies in its licensing.

Whatever you take a free offer from any microstock agency that offers free images that image still has the license attached to it. Whether or not you pay for the image has nothing to do with the license. Licensing is a whole other ballgame. Take DepositPhotos for example. In 2015, they ran a promotion that said that if you were to sign up for a brand-new account as a brand-new customer, you would get five free credits per day for the first seven days of your account. That equates to 35 free images that you didn’t pay for. That’s what free means. “Free” means that the agency offered it for free without payment from you. These images still have the royalty-free license attached to it that governs how you might use it.

“Royalty-free” is something else entirely. Royalty-free is the license that tells you how you can use the image. There are three different licensing schemes that are in use by microstock agencies. Royalty-free is the most common of them. It is the most affordable option and allows you to use the image more than once without paying a royalty. Hence the name, royalty-free – you’re not paying a fee every time you use it.

The next license is an extended license. “Extended” means that you are extending the royalty-free license. This is the kind of license you need if you every intent to reproduce the image for reselling purposes. Although the exact details of the royalty-free license are different from agency to agency, you generally get a certain number of impressions with royalty-free images. If you want to increase that number, you need an extended license. This allows you to print things like business cards, T-shirts, greeting cards, calendars and more.

stock photography

Sometimes that’s not the best for you. What if you needed to use an image exclusively to prevent things like brand dilution? If that’s the case, you need what’s called a “Rights-Managed” license. This is a time-sensitive license that is more expensive than both royalty-free and extended. However, you are granted exclusive use of that image during the license duration. Brand dilution is what happens when a brand loses its value. This offers protection against that because no other competitors can use this same image. This image is exclusively tied to you. Usually, rights managed images allow you for a much larger amount of impressions and print distribution than do royalty-free or even extended license images.