Medium:
Finding great stock photos is a pain. You’re left with either low-res amateur photos, people wearing cheesy headsets, or photos that are out of budget for the project you’re working on. Below is an ongoing list (so bookmark it) of the best stock photo sites I’ve come across.
I love using my own photos to illustrate things but sometimes, you just need one particular kind of shot. There are lots of sites that will charge you for lots of different kinds of images but, if you’re on a budget or just cheap, check out some of the sites listed at this page. Many of them have newsletters you can sign up for that will send you a daily list of new images.
Thanks for this.
Unsplash is awesome. It’s the first place I go for stock photos now.
There’s lots of pretty photos there. But as a photo editor who regularly scours stock agencies for images, so far I’ve found one photo that is somewhat useful to me. And that’s cool. I can look at iStockphoto.com for an hour and come up with nothing. The vast majority of the photos there are useless, cheesy, scattered in terms of subject matter, completely irrelevant to most of the keywords they are tagged with, and technically obvious, inane, just like hundreds of others, equally useless, and full of stereotypes, memes, and puns.
Yeah, a lot of “cute” ideas. But mostly obvious, boring, sexist, facile, and–in the end–depressing. That so many photographers can produce so little in the way of quality work? And on the other hand, greatly skilled staff photographers keep getting laid off and can’t find work become some dope with a DSLR and a few hours experience is willing to work for beans – or nothing for the “exposure.” I’m just glad I’m nearing retirement.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m a very, very lucky photographer. A full time staff job with great benefits, mostly bankers’ hours, and I get to play National Geographic photographer on occasion and travel the world. It’s a plumb job for sure. I’m just sad so few people are this lucky, when there’s so much talent out there, and nobody seems to be willing to pay for it any more. I do pay, and have paid. (Almost $300K one year.) But it’s a drop in a bucket.
I’ve generally had decent results with occasional keyword searches on iStock or Getty. Most of my graphic design for marketing work that calls for photos or illustration ends up sourcing from places like iStockphoto. It’s always a chore to keep the truly generic images at bay.
One client has a parent company that shoots their own material, which we occasionally have access to. That work is only slightly less generic. It was a real treat when that client hired a local photographer to cover their recent conference event, and I’m trying to encourage them to do that more often.
My misfortune in looking for images is that I have such specialized subjects. I look for opal mines in the White Cliffs of Southeast Australia, and I find six or seven “landscapes” with no mines, miners, or opals. And it turns out some of the photos weren’t even actually of the White Cliffs area.
Luckily, I found a photographer in a tiny backwater town in the Outback (the real one, not the restaurant) who had what I needed. And he was quite reasonable at $50 for my use. The Internet is a wonderful thing.
That’s… pretty damn specific. The Internet is indeed wonderful.