Use your pictures in your blog posts? Most bloggers want to increase their posts ' — and blogs-effect with a picture, and while I'm a die-hard textophile, I understand the point. An image is certainly more notable than text. Disconnect the right image with the appropriate category, and you're on fire.
Until recently, was the only image resource site that I use stock.xchng. While I like the site and its offerings, sometimes, there is slim pickings for certain image types. I prefer not to use CC-licensed images myself because some CC-images can be used for commercial purposes, others may not, and the owners of the picture can change their mind, then ask you to take the image down ... to be honest, it all seems a lot of hassle for me.
I work with a lot of content, so maybe that has something to do with my rigidity on this point.
We were recently contacted by Fotolia and offered a month-long process of the service, which has a library of more than 13 million images. There were some images that are not available within the process, but in the month, I 17 images submitted. Only once I found that a picture that I wanted to use is not available in that subscription was — and it wasn't hard to find a replacement, which was just as well.
Fotolia offers vector graphics, photos and videos. The only option I used was images. To give you an idea of what is on offer, I ran a little searching on Fotolia and stock.xchng for the keyword "handshake".
Fotolia has 17,913 results, and the selection was good.
Stock.xchng has 34 results, and the selection was ... not so good.
Both sites can you roll over the images to a comprehensive, lightbox version of the photos to see. Both tell you on the results page which sizes are available, and when you view a specific picture, both sites will tell you how you can use that image — in the case of Fotolia, you can also find out the cost of the image.
A credit system Fotolia used to sell images. The cost of each image depends on:
the size and resolution of the image you license imagethe choosethe itelf — some images just cost more than others.If you plan to buy a pile of images, subscription plans available that can see the images cost you "as little as $ 0.14 per image!"
Fotolia offers two types of licenses:
"The standard license (from XS-XXL and the V license)
"This license, you can use our images to illustrate magazine ads, websites, blogs, marketing campaigns, press articles, tv video or movies, books and book covers, documents, reports, presentations, etc., on all forms of media with no limit on time or copies.
"The extended licenses (X XV)
"This license can buyers in the image can create derivative products intended for resale or distribution where the value of the product is derived from the image (postcards, t-shirts ect.)
"Without limitation you'll be able to create mugs, t-shirts, posters, greeting cards, templates or other products and sell them to your customers."
This is a pretty big bonus about free stock images. Stock.xchng does not permit the resale right of images — if you want to do that, you need to contact the creator via the site contact. That is (probably) no big deal, but from a viewpoint of ease-of-use, Fotolia makes this a no-brainer.
Anyone who works with images knows that there are good stock libraries and bad stock. I can even say that. those who really in design, marketing, and Visual communication can be very fine pick lines between what has deemed "usable" and what not.
I have a bunch of images from stock.xchng used in the past three years or so, and it's pretty easy to tell the dross form the diamonds. Some amateur photographers are great and I'm always able to find something really good on the site.
While Fotolia much more results, and more polished images, for each search, I found generally most of the images to a bit too …. Or contrived. A picture of a hand that reaches from a computer monitor, in particular, made me cringe (I think I was looking for "handshake" at the moment). I still shudder when I think of it.
I can't that image just get out of my head.
Seriously.
But let's move on. I sometimes use what I felt were that less-than-ideal images for want of something better (one of these days I'm going to do my own photoshoot of a branding iron, regardless of what it takes).
That's not to say that there were not some fantastic, amazing photos on the site. And some of the less-polished, not-designed-for-an-ad-agency shots that I feel are more natural and speak more directly to real readers.
All in all, I would say that Fotolia had a large selection of images. I found something I always wanted to — and found it quickly.
If a text fiend, I think search functions universally poor. However, searching on Fotolia was really very good. I had no complaints, that is to say something, and was happy with the results I have every time, which is even more to say.
If you have used image sites before, you know that it can take some intuiting the nature of the image you want. So when I find a shot for Angela's post on humor had to, I expect the worst. I would have to say that I have some pretty unusable results on Fotolia, but with them, I also got some good results, and was very happy with the image I chose. It was relatively low-key, natural and not also.
Choosing photos is a very personal thing, though, and what I think is bad, you see so great. All I can tell you is that I had more luck searching for tough keywords on Fotolia than I've ever elsewhere.
If you do not earn money from your blog, I wouldn't recommend spending money on images. You can good free photography by so many other sources get — you spend money on something that directly translates to more readers.
If you want to make money through your site, Fotolia is worth a look. You don't have to make millions, either. The images that I bought cost US $ 0.33 each, and I downloaded 17 images during the process, so all up, Darren would have looked $ 5.61 for three weeks worth of images here on ProBlogger. Not bad!
If you:
deal with a bunch of contentdon't want to have to worry about licensing and permissionswant to spend as little as possible make your posts look goodwant to finish looking for images so you have time [other, more interesting task insert here]... than Fotolia could provide the answer.
Have you used Fotolia? What about other sites stock photography? Let us know how you images on your sites via the manage comments.
No comments:
Post a Comment