Tom Nunamaker

I took Don Crowther’sadvice last year and started to build my image library.  I was trying to minimize the cost per image as I wanted quite a few to choose from in my library.  Something crazy in my brain figured out that fotolia’s 100 images/day deal was the best value.  So I paid the $747 price and started downloading my 100 files. WHAT HAVE I DONE? I immediately realized I had bitten off a HUGE time commitment to find, download and file away 100 images per day.  I think I figured out I had made a huge mistake about 10 minutes into my first day’s downloads.  I ended up spending 2 hours per day for the next month downloading images! I learned my lesson Now it’s 1 year later and I’d like to start adding fresh images to my library.  I’ve been looking at the same images for 1 year now after all.  I’ve probably only used 10% to 15% of the images in my library so I’m going to throttle back my image purchases this time.  I have three requirements: - I don’t want to spend more than $650 maximum - I want to keep the cost per image to $0.25 or less - I don’t want to download more than 30 files per day. 25 or less is better. My research With those restrictions in mind, I started to do some price comparisons of the various royalty free stock photo websites available.  The following table shows my research with current prices as of today and how many images each website says they have.  The cells with the green background color meet my requirements of price and cost per image:

http://www.photos.com/		2.6 million
	100/week (14/day)	Images	Cost/Image
3 Months	$299	1300	0.23
6 Months	$549	2600	0.21
1 Year	$988	5200	0.19
http://us.fotolia.com/		15 million
	25/day	Images	Cost/Image
1 Month	$249	750	$0.33
3 Months	$649	2250	$0.29
6 Months	$1,199	4500	$0.27
1 Year	$2,099	9000	$0.23
http://www.shutterstock.com/		16.8 million
	25/day	Images	Cost/Image
1 Month	$249	750	$0.33
3 Months	$709	2250	$0.32
1 Year	$2,559	9000	$0.28
http://www.123rf.com/		11.1 million
	26/day	Images	Cost/Image
1 Month	$230	780	$0.29
3 Months	$590	2340	$0.25
1 Year	$1,960	9360	$0.21
http://www.thinkstockphotos.com/
	25/day	Images	Cost/Image
1 Month	$299	750	$0.40
1 Year	$2,388	9000	$0.27
http://www.photospin.com/		2.1 million
	25/day	Images	Cost/Image
1 Month	$188	750	$0.25
3 Months	$388	2250	$0.17
6 Months	$688	4500	$0.15
1 Year	$1,188	9000	$0.13
http://www.ingimage.com/		1 million
	35/day	Images	Cost/Image
1 Month	$199	1050	$0.19
3 Months	$339	3150	$0.11
1 Year	$889	12600	$0.07
http://www.istockphoto.com/
	30/day	Images	Cost/Image
3 Months	$979	2700	$0.36
6 Months	$1,862	5400	$0.34
1 Year	$3,542	10800	$0.33
http://www.photosxpress.com/		12.7 million
	500/month	Images	Cost/Image
1 Month	$550	500	$1.10
	25/month	Images	Cost/Image
1 Month	$37.50	25	$1.50

Results Only rows with both price and cost per images columns in green are contenders for me. This leaves me with: http://www.photos.com/ 3 and 6 month plans http://www.123rf.com/ 3 month plan http://www.photospin.com/ 1 and 3 month plans http://www.ingimage.com/ 1 and 3 month plans The most tempting is http://www.ingimage.com/ based on price and cost per image, which are $199/$0.19 and $339/$0.11. The problem I think is it only has 1 million images. Only http://www.123rf.com/ has over 10 million images and wins on my other criteria. I’ll do sample searches on all four contender sites, but I have a feeling 123 Royalty Free will win. iStock Photo, Shutter Stock and Think Stock Photos had some beautiful photos, but I can’t justify the price yet. If you have a bigger budget, I would consider them. Conclusion There are many websites selling royalty free stock photos. It’s not hard to get great photos for your website at affordable prices. Do some sample searches on each site to see if it has photos you’re interested in. Don’t make my mistake from last year of ordering 100 images per day if you work alone. Start building YOUR photo library. You won’t regret it. Where do you get your photos? Leave a comment below! UPDATE I did several searches on the sites and found Shutterstock had the best images for my needs. I found an online coupon for a 10% discount. After I did a 1 month subscription, I noticed the auto-renew was turned on. Make sure you turn that off or you’ll get rebelled the next month! I went to turn it off and Shutterstock offered to reduce my monthly bill another 5% so the $249/month program is now only $212.80/month. At this price, for 25 images per day, that is $0.283 per image. It’s slightly more than I wanted to pay but the selection of over 16.8 million images is amazing. I’ll write up Shutterstock later after I use it for a while.

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