Carl Chapman

Microstock Photography – From the Buyers Perspective

Confined to the office today while waiting for the next cyclone to hit, I decided to update some images on one of my commercial websites. Browsing various microstock sites, I was struck by the variation of image quality and lack of creative content.

I decided to update some of the images on one of my commercial websites, as they no longer represented the message I was trying to convey, and set about trawling the microstock web for replacements.

Free Microstock

I started by searching around some of the free microstock sites such as  Stock.Xchng, Stock Vault, and Dreamstime Free Stock.

There were a couple of good images in the free stock collections, but in most cases the variety of images is small and the quality is pretty poor.

I also came across the EverystockPhoto website, which interestingly collects photos from a number of sources, including indexing Flickr images. A couple of things surprised me:-

• The images from Flickr seem to be based on Creative Commons licenses. Depending on your privacy/usage selection in Flickr, it is possible images of your friends, family or even last year’s Christmas party could appear on this site for others to use.
• The site is caching the Flickr images. Clicking on a few of the images Flickr links, the browser goes to the Flickr site and says either the image has been deleted, or the user no longer exists. The worry here is that you may have thought deleting your image from your Flickr account gets rid of it, but in fact it can still exist on this and other sites…. (As a Flickr user, I am not sure I am comfortable with this.)
• The site uses an Attribution License System, but I wonder how many users would actually attribute the image to a photographer on their site, or in a document. It reminds me of the recent case where a leading newspaper used a Photographers image without consent.

Paid Microstock

Unable to find any satisfactory free images, I started browsing paid microstock sites such as iStockphoto, Shutterstock, etc.

It was an interesting experience being a buyer looking for particular images to illustrate a concept. Having a photography background and a particular requirement in mind, you tend to be quite harsh in critiquing others work. Thinking about how you could improve others images is an excellent learning experience on how to improve your own photography.

The image quality on the microstock sites seemed to fall into 3 categories:- professional, quite good, and poor….. and there were a lot of poor quality images.

The professional quality images really stood out, but I was surprised that many of them had just been thrown together without much thought put into layout and construction. E.g. I was searching for an image similar to that above, but could not find any from the 2000+ search results on iStockphoto, that contained a computer keyboard and notepad shot from a low angle. Many of the keyboard images were taken from a position directly above, and lacked any creative thought.  In several cases it appears the photographer has moved the elements around to make multiple images, but has not thought about composition or making a good image.

While digging around, I also found a number of images that would be useful for my elearning courses. With elearning taking off, the market for learning and web content will continue to expand, and in turn increase the requirement for quality microstock images.

In Summary

With free microstock images you generally get what you pay for. The selection is limited and the quality is not that great.

Paid microstock images are a viable solution for professional looking images for use in websites and eLearning courses, however the image quality and creativeness can vary widely.

As a photographer, putting yourself into the position of a buyer can be an excellent educational experience. It gives you a chance to critique others images and determine how you could do better, while analysing collections for niche gaps that provide possible business opportunities.

I learned quite a bit from being a buyer today, and in future am going to put more thought into the composition of my images.

 

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This entry was posted on Sunday, January 24th, 2010 at 6:41 pm. It is filed under Stock Photography and tagged with composition, creative commons, flickr, free microstock, My Microstock Galleries, photography, stock. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.