Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with stockphotography

FTP for stock photo clients?

klinefelter — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 10:18:06 -0800

Setting up an FTP account in cpanel for photography clients? I'm a professional photographer who's making the move online (finally) for sales and client services. My host uses cpanel for managing my hosting account, and I need to provide clients with an easy way to access large files. FTP seems to be the standard, but when I use this it requires my stock clients to have an FTP client installed.

Is there an easier way for them to access files without using installed software, just through their web browser?

Stock photography for beginners

soviet sleepover — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 14:58:48 -0800

I recently received an email asking if I'd be interested in adding some of my photos to a stock photography website/collection. What should I ask, or be thinking about, as I consider this? The email (from the creative manager of StockphotoPro, FWIW) mentions several of my photos on Flickr, i.e. the writer's clearly "done his homework" in looking through my photos, and has picked a couple good ones. But I'm an amateur photographer, I enjoy experimenting, and I'm pretty lax about taking pictures seriously, so many of my pictures are either snapshots or have the kind of subject matter &/or lighting that stock photo archives don't tend to be interested in. All this to say that if someone's shown interest in my photos, I'm probably one of hundreds of people he's sent the same sort of email to. Am I right in thinking this, or just lucky to have been stumbled upon?

I'm not averse to having my photos included in stock photography archives, but I'm not extremely interested in it, either. Of course, a little extra money/royalties would make me more interested, but will this amount to more than pennies? What should I ask him about? Or, more generally, what should someone who's considering selling [a small handful of] images to stock photography archives know or be aware of?

Royalty-free stock photography for corporate use?

melissa — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 13:06:44 -0800

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!

I need lots of cheap, crappy stock photography- where to find?

RustyBrooks — Mon, 12 Jul 2004 09:06:25 -0800

Looking for cheap, crappy stock photography. I recently revived an old project of mine, a photomosic program, and I need source material, lots of it. I wrote this program a long long time ago for fun, and recently decided to rewrite it again now that I know some math. I'm making good progress. I'd provide a link but at the moment it's highly unstable.

Anyway, I need hundreds of thousands of images for this to work well. They don't need to be high quality, in fact, images that are around 200x200 pixels are really pretty perfect.

I have gone the route of buying crappy stock photo cds at $5-10. These generally have about 10,000 images each. So I'd need, say, 20-50 of these to really get going. Ouch.

There has got to be somewhere that I can get stuff like this. Most stock photo sites offer previews that are about the right size but they're generally resistant to spidering. For the last week I've been (very gently) downloading lots of movie covers from amazon, but even if I get ALL of their covers it won't be near enough.

To make things worse, I probably actually need MILLIONS of pictures, because someone might want to, say, make a mosaic entirely out of pictures of animals or something.

Anyone have any ideas? Anyone want to donate CDs of crappy stock photos? My company has 10 or 20 cds of stock photos that I was drooling over. Looked at them today, and they have only 100 photos per CD, since they're intended for print use. Doh! I want the exact opposite.

Can anyone recommend any royalty-free stock photography web sites?

MegoSteve — Fri, 28 May 2004 10:51:47 -0800

Can anyone recommend any royalty-free stock photography web sites? [more inside] I used to use Photodisc, but they are just way out of my clients' price range nowadays. Their sales emphasis seems to be on collections rather than single images. I've been using istockphoto a lot, but just wondered if there were other sites that are similar that I'm unaware of.