Microstock Photography for Graphic Design
Low Cost Images for Designers
Before the internet became so huge, Graphic Designers had much more limited choice as to where to source effective and communicative stock photography, but the growth of microstock sites is now expanding the options. Before microstock, a number of big name stock photography companies dominated the market selling professionally produced photography at relatively high prices.
The shifting of the focus away from these stock photo suppliers has been due to the growth of the web and there are two factors of this growth that are responsible for the change.
Why has Microstock Grown so Large?
The first, more obvious reason, is that the web has made it much easier for suppliers to connect with potential customers. Before the net became became so pervading, the stock photo suppliers had to produce and distribute printed catalogues several times a year, each time at great cost. Today, anyone can set up a website and display stock photos for very little expense.
The second reason is that the web has turned huge numbers of people into publishers. Every person who has a blog is a publisher and many of these bloggers understand that they need to offer a visually appealing site to complement their written content. Buying an image from a stock photography company for every post would be financially prohibitive, but purchasing from microstock companies can be viable for many sites.
Does Microstock Offer Value for Money?
While the increased demand from web publishers has been a large driving factor in the growth of microstock, Graphic Designers for print can also benefit as many microstock sites offer their images at different sizes.
It should be noted that the growth of microstock has been accompanied by the growth of free stock photo sites and many may question the wisdom of paying for images when other sites are offering them for free.
Microstock sites, however, do have quality control systems in place, whereas many of the free stock photography sites readily allow anyone to upload images to their sites once they have registered.
The big microstock sites require submitters to achieve certain standards before they are allowed to start uploading images and even then submitters are required to maintain high standards, so ensuring that users will always find images of good technical and aesthetic quality. This should mean that it takes a user less time to find a suitable image and, in a world where time is money, it could be argued that this quality control system is what a user is paying for, rather than the image.
Buying Microstock Photography
There are some very well known microstock sites, but for newcomers to this sector, the three largest sites in terms of images (at this time) are probably the best places to start finding out more.
- Shutterstock is the current leader and is enjoying strong growth in its library of images.
- Dreamstime is almost a million images behind, but is well worth a look.
- iStockphoto, the first out of the blocks in this sector, isn't far behind these 2 and is regarded by some as being more demanding in their quality control.
While it is possible to source free stock photography, the quality control mechanisms that most microstock photography sites have in place can make the low costs involved worthwhile because of the reduced amount of time that has to be spent finding a technically and aesthetically suitable image.
Microstock sites offer quality, low cost photos
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