Ok, so I need some photos for a website. It’s pretty specific stuff, construction type work and contexts.
So being a good citizen and wanting to make sure the artist gets paid, i google “stock photos” and get several hits.
The first one I select is “Getty Images” a well known, and I presume, reputable outfit.
To my surprise I find a few images—water heaters, HVAC stuff etc. (I would have imagined that they would not have trafficked in such pedestrian items.) They didn’t have a lot of items, but some of what they had interested me.
And so I keep looking at other sites, and to my surprise I find other stock photo sites that have some of the exact same images for sale.
What gives? How do I know that I’m paying the artist, as opposed to some guy who bought it from Getty and is reselling it?
Can you do that? Can you buy a photo for resale?
What is “Royalty Free?”
Whats the Straight Dope on purchasing stock photos?
What I’d do if taking the photos myself wasn’t practical and a site was selling the photos I needed, is to get a guarantee in writing that the photos were obtained legally.
Over on another board we just had a case where someone’s garden photo was used without permission on a commercial site, and when the person complained, the commercial outfit claimed it had bought the photo from a stock photo site.
It would be all too easy for such sites to lift photos from various places on the Internet. I personally have had photos taken off a website and used to sell somebody’s products.
Unless the contract the photographer enters with the stock site is for exclusive rights, photographers own their photography and are allowed to sell through different, even competing services.
Royalty Free means you pay a flat, one time (usually reasonable and affordable) fee for the image, and you’re allowed to use it as you wish, under their licence agreement. Buying an image with Royalties are usually much more expensive (but the images are typically that much better), and the cost for the image is determined by answering questions from a representitive on what and how you’re planning on using it… For how long, what’s the distribution, how many copies, and so forth. Anything above and beyond these negotiated terms, and you have to pay more (royalties).
Royalty free doesn’t mean “free,” but means basically that you pay once for the right to use the photograph however many times you wish*, without having to pay royalties to the original owner or creator for each subsequent use.
Services such as Dreamstime and iStockphoto, among many other similar collectives, offer good deals where you buy multiple credits for, say, $20, and can then download images for which you’re charged X credits. Web-quality versions usually cost somewhere from 1 - 3 credits (usually $1 - $3). Higher resolutions usually cost more credits. (Dreamstime is more reasonable, with high quality versions costing about 5 - 10 credits; iStockphoto can go for 30+ credits.) The usual restriction on these licenses is that you can’t resell the photos, and there may be limits to super-mass printing, as in quantities greater than 100,000.
Individual photographers can join these collectives and sell their work through them. There is a slight concern that some people might upload images/photos that they don’t own, so choose a reputable stock photo outlet where this sort of thing is discouraged.
According to whatever the license allows – this might only be for non-commercial use, or for printed work, or for web-only work, etc. Many royalty free images don’t have such restrictions, but some do, so I recommend reading the license info carefully.
Edited to add: and I see I’ve been scooped by cmyk!
The nice thing about sites like Dreamstime is that they list the copyright holder so you can verify that everything looks kosher. Also, most of the photographers upload multiple shots in a set, so you can see the same object, person, or landscape from different angles or with different backgrounds.
