Stock Photography

[Rodney S. Toliver]

I want to know what stock photography service your institution uses for published material, if any. I understand that usually we use our own students. However, in some cases, stock images may be useful.

Which service do you use?

[Susan]

Our school uses istockphoto.com. Each campus' graphic designers have credits on that site to use for our materials.

[Rodney S. Toliver]

Did your school buy a license or do you just buy credits as needed? If you bought a license, what kind?

[Susan]

Well, our process isn't the ideal one. We have four campuses, and each sort of has their own credits (no licenses). And once they're purchased, they don't share the purchases stock art with other campuses (which I think they should, but I'm the Web Content Editor, not the director of graphics, so what do I know...hahaha).

[Rodney S. Toliver]

LOL...

I know how it goes sometimes. And it seems the Web people may be the last to know in certain instances.

We were researching shutterstock and they have a standard license. However, I am a little unsure about the price and number of images. We small or medium photos at $4 a pop. Does that sound like a reasonable price to you?

[Susan]

Yeah. That's about right if you buy them one at a time. We're in the wrong business: we should be photographers! hahaha.

I found out we buy a subscription (well, each campus) from istockphoto. You can see the rates there on the site. But they charge $3 for small and $5 for medium...so...it's about in line with the $4.

[Kyle James]

I'm with Susan. We have an iStockPhoto account.

This year we finally got a full time photographer so we try to use him as much as possible and if possible we will send him out to take a picture for something, but sometimes you need a graphic or something and just need stock.

[Rodney S. Toliver]

Hey thanks. We have been given the "go-ahead" to purchase a standard license for stock images. I wanted to check to see what everyone else was doing first, though.

[Genevieve Howard]

I first try to use photos from our campus photographers or students. For general stock stuff, we have an account from clipart.com where the yearly subscription fee is pretty reasonable and I have also found free images with Creative Commons licenses on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/

[Rodney S. Toliver]

Excellent! This is certainly helpful for me. We are also trying to be "copyright-conscious" as a Web team so the Flick reference will help. Of what quality are the images from clipart.com?

[Genevieve Howard]

Generally on the smaller side, between 300 - 500 pixels for height and width, 72 dpi. You can browse their site without a subscription to see the type of images offered. Just make sure to choose Photos under the Media dropdown in the search box to avoid the clipart, etc.

[Eric Kowalik]

Our school has a subscription to Photos.com, a royalty-free stock photography web site. The one year fee is $450, which isn't bad. You can download photos at various sizes and they include pretty high resolutions for all their photos.

With over 2.1 million images and over 100,000 new images added a month it has a very wide selection and the search feature works well in helping you narrow down what your looking for.

The key wording is well done and I've inputted abstract terms before and received pretty relevant results.

[social networking web design]

www.istockphoto.com is a great resource and is reasonably priced.

sandy
megastar media