By John Bryan on

For those of us just breaking into commercial scale of website production...

- Any reccomendations for which stock photo /art-work resources are best in terms of cost and quality?

- Also which price plans for your recommedation do you sugest e.g. is it likely to be better to pay monthly allowance or individual download fees?

- Which include tiled textures, buttons etc.? Is it better to get your textures and buttons from a more specialised service?

Yes I know that there are some free royalty-free resources but they tend to not have the volume or quality of a commercial service (particularly for photos) and you can loose a lot of time trawling through them all.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 4.5.x or older, Drupal 4.6.x, Drupal 4.7.x, Drupal 5.x, Drupal 6.x

Comments

budgetstockphoto’s picture

budgetstockphoto commented

It depends on who your clients are and how exclusive you want the images to be, but I guess if you are just looking for royalty free images for use online then I would go with one of the microstock sites, some of them offer a subscription but you would have to be doing quite a lot of design work to make one of those worth while.

http://microstockinsider.com/microstock_price_comparison
has a comparison of prices for one off purchases of images compared against the number of images some of the major microstock agencies have. The prices come down if you buy more 'credits'

a lot of people recommend shutterstock if you want subscription images and the seem good value to me

if you want better quality and much more diverse subject then try alamy (but the prices sky rockets as they are a traditional stock agency)

there are also lots of sites offering free photos, but the amount you save using those compared to the time it takes to find them means that its not really worth it compared to easy access and the quality of the microstock sites these days

textures (web ones) and buttons, i know the microstock sites have a lot of 'icons and buttons' but you have to cut them out and make them web ready, they come in resolutions to use in print as well, they are not in sets of gif of png etc ready for use, that might be a more specialist service.

aaronstewie’s picture

aaronstewie commented

i find that the smaller sites offer less selection but better over all quality , ive bough some stuff from http://www.winklerimages.com/store/ just to find the same pictures cheaper at http://www.corbisimages.com/?s_kwcid=corbis&gclid=CPj58sHM2aACFdk55QodLy...
its very similar for royalty free music .. u can find the same track on http://coolstockmusic.com/ as on http://www.soundtax.net/ on coolstock it will cost $20 and on soundtaxi ull pay up to a $1000 for the same exact track and alot less rights , where and how you can use it .

royalty free site dont create their own content (usually) its crowd sourced
since the content creators (the actual photographers/composers) spread their pictures or music all over the web , and in most cases don't really care how the stuff sell as long as it does ... u can usually find the exact same photo or music piece on a bunch of different sites for a different price on each.