Royalty-free stock photography for corporate use?

January 10, 2006 1:06 PM

What are your favourite royalty-free stock photography resources for corporate use?

I am part of a six-person publishing/production/creative department for a medium-sized Canadian company. We are responsible for producing materials for both internal and external clients. We are looking for lower-cost, high quality royalty-free stock photography for our materials. Lower cost is an issue as we are still educating people that we cannot just download pictures off the net and plunk them in our designs for quality and copyright reasons.

Ideally, we would like to go with a subscription to a service versus buying each photo individually. We would also like to have one account all of us in the department could use (or a multi-user account) to search for and buy photos for our projects. Our files are stored on a network, but only one person is using them at a time. Files are occasionally handed off to a client for them to print themselves, but generally we take care of printing.

I have sent an email to istockphoto.com asking if they would meet our needs (I haven't heard back, and it's been several days - I probably need to reword and try again.), as I am a happy user for my personal projects. No matter what I use, I I want to be sure that we wouldn't be violating any licenses or terms of use. We were using BizArt by Hemera, and it wasn't bad, but we wore it out fairly quickly. :)

I have been Googling and searching the AskMe archives for more info, but I keep finding more about free imagery, and most free sites are not for corporate users, and I want to respect that.

Many thanks for any ideas or recommendations you have!

posted by melissa to computers & internet (14 comments total)

stock.xchng
posted by purephase at 1:09 PM on January 10, 2006

photos.com isn't bad for stock photos. The photos are certainly stock-photos, but they're fairly cheap.

Be careful with sxc.hu (stock exchange) not all are free for commercial use. Morguefile.com is better in that respect and have a comparable selection.
posted by miniape at 1:34 PM on January 10, 2006

SuperStock
posted by UnclePlayground at 1:54 PM on January 10, 2006

ah, ratfarts...

www.superstock.com
posted by UnclePlayground at 1:56 PM on January 10, 2006

My site - PDPhotos.org. All free and public domain. But not geared towards corporate themes, so I might not have the types of images you need. But take a look.
posted by y6y6y6 at 2:26 PM on January 10, 2006

Aarin Free Photo, Amazing Textures, Cromavista, Image Base, Earth from Space, Freestockphotos.com, Geek Philosopher, Image Blowout, FWS2, Majestic Imagery, Mandragora, NASA, OpenPhoto, Orangetrash, PDPhoto, NPS Digital Image Index, PIX, DeviantArt, tOfz, AboutPixel, A digital Dreamer, Afflict, ArtFavor, Bajstock, BigFoto, Cepolina, Creativity 103, Demny Onink, Designpacks, Fontplay, Fotodatebank, Fotogenica, Four Bees, FreeFoto, Free Images, Burning Well, Free media Goo, Free Photos Bank, Free Photo Station, Freewebpics, FWS1, Gimp-Savy, Image After, ImageTemple, Insect Images, Lightmatter, Litetek, LogoDesignweb, Mayang, Morguefile (highly recommended), NPS, NWYH Stock Images, PhotoCase, NOAA, Picture Station, Piotrpix, Pixelbag, Pixel Perfect Digital, Pixelquelle, The Photo Repository, Stockvault, Stock Exchange (highly recommended), Texture Warehouse, Triparalbum, Twice Pix, Unprofound, USDA, Woophy

shamelessly stolen and reformatted from here
posted by Rhomboid at 2:27 PM on January 10, 2006 [1 favorite]

And I should mention I haven't actually gone through all of that list, so some of those may not actually be royalty-free -- blame the author of that blog post if that's the case.
posted by Rhomboid at 2:29 PM on January 10, 2006

I second stock.xchng. It's saved my ass on several occasions...
posted by brundlefly at 2:32 PM on January 10, 2006

Not quite what you're asking, but here is a potentially useful roundup article about various recommended royalty-free stock sites. It's from a somewhat less commercial perspective though.
posted by -harlequin- at 4:13 PM on January 10, 2006

if you get an answer from istock...... I use them all the time for website layouts. No problems logging in, buying credits, downloading or anything else. I highly recommend them.

(I was actually wondering about the subscription thing just last week. can you keep us informed of what you find out???)
posted by damnjezebel at 5:01 PM on January 10, 2006

i would recommend shutterstock.com, and not just because they use my images. they are a subscription-based site, are growing very quickly, and have a huge number of stock photos, drawings, fractals, and vector images.

for single users, a subscription allows you to download up to 25 images per day. according to their faq's page, they do have multi-user license arrangements available. i have found their customer service (for submitters, at least) to be prompt and helpful.
posted by lisaj32 at 5:37 PM on January 10, 2006

Missed this the first time. http://yotophoto.com searches all of the free libraries.
posted by katiecat at 3:55 AM on January 11, 2006

this is helpful. thank you! I've googled or heard of many of these sites, but it's nice to know that real people have actually had luck with them, (or actually run them in y6y6y6's case)

I'm going to look through these, and see what will work for us.
posted by melissa at 5:40 AM on January 11, 2006

I also just found an interesting Wikipedia link:

List of Stock Photography Archives

This list has been broken down into major and minor agencies, micro (online-based) agencies, and free archives. Hope this helps someone else.
posted by melissa at 8:04 AM on January 11, 2006