What's the best stock photo site?

July 25, 2007 2:01 PM

What's the best stock photo site (including pay sites)? Along the lines of this question, I'm looking for a high-quality site that offers royalty-free stock photos. I'm looking for basic corporate techie stuff for an IT government (read:not-for-profit) web site - people working at a laptop, servers and wiring shot from cool angles, etc. The previous question brought up some good free stuff, but what about pay sites such as Corbis? I'd really like some sort of subscription-based setup instead of paying a la carte for each photo (if that even exists).
posted by adverb to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

Corbis, Getty, Jupiter, Masterfile, and age fotostock are some traditional agencies (ie: they have pros shooting for them) with good reputations.

Then there are microstock sites like iStockPhoto where it's mostly amateurs and semi-pros shooting, but the cost is much lower (mostly because these companies are banking on their contributors lack of knowledge about how much their images are worth). There is some good stuff on these sites but you have to wade through mountains of crap to find it, whereas with more traditional agencies the barrier to entry is much higher so there is a much, much higher ratio of good:bad images.

Also with more traditional stock agencies they often will do research for you for free and in general the keywording is better (so it's a lot easier to find what you need).
posted by bradbane at 2:13 PM on July 25, 2007

Stock.xchng is one of my favorites, as is Everystockphoto.com.

But a very helpful portal for free and pay stock photo galleries (and a bajillion other sites for fonts, PS brushes, vector files, icons and more) is BLUE VERTIGO.
posted by blastrid at 2:52 PM on July 25, 2007

Best answer: This is a similar question I asked back in January of last year. It may help you out.
posted by melissa at 3:04 PM on July 25, 2007

I have used stock.xchng (http://www.sxc.hu/) for a couple years, and it has rarely failed me.
posted by The Deej at 3:25 PM on July 25, 2007

http://www.hemera.com/
posted by TheRaven at 6:32 PM on July 25, 2007

I would like to humbly offer up Art Life Images for consideration for professional buyers as the site aggregates the big and best RF brands (Getty, Jupiter and Corbis) as well as having a huge Rights-Managed collection for your design and ad customers that need to know the usage history of an image that they are considering. RM doesn't necessarily cost much more than RF images as well, depending on the usage.
posted by Art _Life_Images at 7:42 AM on August 24, 2007