Stock Photography—Value, Price, and Pitfalls

Stock photography is a great tool for graphic designers, especially since it’s now almost all available for search and purchase on the web. Companies like Corbis, Veer and Getty Images offer advanced search capabilities and the ease of purchase online or by ordering CDs full of images in a variety of topic categories. In a matter of minutes you can have hundreds of photos to choose from on almost any subject. This makes comping a design with decent photography very easy, and many times you can end up with a selection of photos you can buy and use for the final design.

If you need an image that is not practical to shoot yourself like a sunset in Hawaii, or a photo of a growling bear, stock photography is probably the answer. Practicality aside, cost is usually a factor as well. Hiring models, and photographers is not usually an inexpensive proposition. If $300-$500 sounds like a lot for a photo of an attractive couple running along the beach sounds expensive, then try getting that couple and a decent photographer to sign away rights to use that photo for the same amount of money.

There are a few things to keep in mind is using stock photos…

Two Stock Photo Options

Royalty Free Photography
Royalty free photos are less expensive, and once you buy them, you can usually use them forever, and for whatever you want depending on the usage agreement.

The advantage of royalty free is price and flexibility, but the disadvantage is that the photos are not usually as good, and there is no restriction on how many people can be using the same image at the same time. It would be a bummer to design a brochure with a stock photo on the cover that was exactly the same photo used by the competition on their brochure.

Rights Managed Photography - Photos that are priced based on what they will be used for and for how long fall under the rights managed category. The pricing is based on how many pieces will be printed, how big the market is geographically and what industry the materials are designed for. There is usually a time limit those images can be used as well. Rights managed photos are usually better quality, and are less likely to be used while you are using them, but they are several times more expensive.

Choose Wisely
It’s important to evaluate whether you or your client can afford rights managed photography before you begin to design or even search for stock photography. If someone falls in love with a photo that they can’t afford it can be tough trying to explain why you sold them on that photo in the first place.

I’ve had clients who have done their own searches and come back to me with photos they assume are a couple hundred dollars, only to find out they are actually several thousand dollar images. I usually have to go back and search for a similar image in royalty free stock, and hope I come up with something close.

One such situation happened where a client found a photo of some cows they wanted to use. I went to buy it for the project and discovered it was rights managed. We found out it would cost $3000-$4000 to use that image. There were no royalty free images that were as good, so we ended up hiring a photographer to chase cows around a field for two days to get the shot we ended up using. In the end it cost less that the rights managed image and it was a better shot.

The Internet Is Not Your Personal Image Library
A common misconception I’ve seen clients make is thinking that “If its on the web it’s free”. I recently had a client download and use an image from Google Images on their web site. Several months later they received a bill from a large stock photography house for $1,000. Turns out that image was actually a rights managed stock photo. The stock photo company somehow found the image on the clients web site, and demanded payment. It’s their image and, in essence, it was stolen, though not intentionally.

A photograph is a valuable product just like a pair of shoes or a rocking chair. Most of us would have no problem buying either of those items because they take skill to create that we don’t generally have. Photographs on the other hand are easy, especially with digital cameras right? Wrong. Photographs may be easy to take, but good photographs take lots of skill, and that skill has a price.

~ by njglover on March 9, 2007.