Using photos for your business, where do you get them?

Business needs photography. It is one of the best investments that you can make and will set out the tone of your company, show your values and get a message across to your audience quickly.

But where should that photography come from?

And what does using those choices say about you?

Let's take look at some sources and weigh up some of the Pros and Cons of each.

We'll start off with the Free options.

There are a plethora of free image sites these days but as far as I can tell they follow 3 different models.

Flickr

Now you may think the Flickr is more a photo sharing community site than a place to find images. One of the original web 2.0 social media sites. You'd be both right and wrong.

Flickr signed up to the Creative Commons project very early on.

This allowed users to attach a number of different license options to their photographs. From All Rights Reserved to Attribution.

There are 3 licenses that are open to commercial use. Attribution, Attribution ShareAlike and Attribution No Derivs.

There's a full explanation on the Creative Commons website about licenses.

The creative commons always seemed a bit more aligned towards academic uses and personal blogs. There have been some unintended consequences of users putting their images out there. One of them being photos of their children being used to train AI face recognition software.

Smugmug bought FLickr from Yahoo a couple of years ago which is probably the best thing to happen to the site in a decade. However they deleted a lot of photographs from the free accounts. But despite that there's still a massive amount of imagry stored on their servers.

Unsplash & Pexels

These two sites are similar.

They operate like stock photo websites where you can search for images based on a keyword with only one difference. All the images are free to use to whatever purpose.

You don't need to credit the photographer or link to their website

The only thing you can't do is create another stock photo website and fill it with the images from unsplash and then sell them.

These and a few others have gained in popularity and attention over the last couple of years and for personal use, or to illustrate a blog post like this on Linkedin or one on Medium then I see no problems with them.

However!

I do see a couple of big problems when they are used for commercial purposes. Starting with the big one.

They do not have releases!

There are no releases for models or trademarks or property. So if you use those photos on a commcerial website you are leaving yourself wide open to legal challenges. The terms of both websites put all of that responsibility onto you as the end user.

Pexels license reads as follows

https://www.pexels.com/photo-license/

The Unsplash license page doesn't fare any better. Again putting responsibility onto you. But there is a very interesting word used in this. That word is "consumer"

The second problem with these I have is an ethical one.

The license reads "The Unsplash license allows a photographer to relinquish their rights to a photo"

Why the hell would anyone want to do that? That's like an employee relinquishing their rights to have wages and sick days and holidays. If someone has made it finacially worth your while to relinquish your rights then fair enough, but otherwise why would you do this?

To me this feels exploitative. Using images from these types of website basically says that you support those practices. It's like buying battery chicken eggs or dolphin unfriendly tuna.

Whenever I see commercial businesses or those doing work for profit using photographs sourced from these types of site it make me feel grubby and I look on them less favourably.

Non commcerial and community interest? - fill your boots.

I can see how a business could use these type of website for marketing purposes, not as a consumer but as a provider of images. Make a series of images based on a theme and make sure the business product is on display in every one. So that virtually every photo in that them has your proudct front and centre. The end users don't need to worry about trademarks because they've obtained those images from the source.

Death to Stock

If the first free choice was Creative Commons and the second was effectively public domain then the third model is the one that Death to Stock use. Freemium.

They give away bundles of free images which can be used for anything. Unlike the other sites there's a subscription upgrade option available. And a fair distribution of revenue. They are not the only site using this model but they are probably the best known.

OK, let's look at the Inexpensive options.

These are the more tradtional stock photography website. Before I go any further I will explain the difference in license types.

There are 2 types of stock photo license. Royalty Free and Rights Managed.

Royalty Free you'll pay by the file size.

So an image 1024 pixels wide will cost less than an image 6000 pixels wide.

Rights Managed you'll pay by usage.

So a full spread front cover on a daily newspaper or a high traffic website will cost less thana thumbnail on the bottom of page 32.

Or if you use an image on your website, on a brochure and on an advert on social then that's 3 uses so will cost you more.

Microstock,

(Shutterstock, Adobe Stock, istock photo)

Microstock sites have been around for decades. At the advent of digital cameras they exploded in popularity. The plus side of that is the amount of images available. These sites are vast. Downside, these sites are vast! Finding what you're looking for is time consuming.

Traditional Stock

Alamy, Getty Images, Stocksy, Picfair, Eyeem

Getty are the behemoth of the stock photo world and have partnerships with all sorts of other sites. From Flickr, 500px, Eyeem onwards. Images that are subitted directly to them tend to be exclusive for them, where as you can submit the same images to different platforms as you wish. For the end user that means you'll keep seeing the same images but with different price tags depending on the platform your using.

All of these sites have massive image libraries. Picfair are an interesting one that has been around for about 5 years. This was designed to be a bit more fair on everyone and a lot more fair on the photographers submitting the work.

All stock photo sites require releases for models or trademarks. So using work from here you're safe in the knowledge that it's been checked off and won't land you in court.

It is possible to use Getty's image library for free but only for non commercial uses. You can embed the photos using their software. I suppose technically the images are never on your website, it's just a window looking into their galleries.

https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/resources/embed

There are some drawbacks to these sites and really they operate best if used for filler content. Firstly there's no exclusivity in the photographs, so you may end up using the same images as your competitors. Secondly the photos can be a bit cheesy. See Woman laughing at Salad or the Distracted Boyfriend for example.

Lastly, the revenue splits heavily favour the agencies over the creators. It's not 50-50 it's more like 70-30 between agency and creator.

Indiviual photographers Image libraries.

I know of many photographers who have ultra niche image libraries based on every subject you can imagine. Farming, fishing, music, industrial, archeology, sport, water droplets, you name it.

Of course it's harder to find an individual than it would be to just type a keyword into Getty's site. But what you'd find would be something unique that the competition isn't using.

Using tools like 500px or Photoshelter or Smugmug you can search individual photographers using those platforms. They can operate almost like a virtual agency and all have sales tools built in. They do all take a transaction fee for a sale but the rest goes to the photographer. The pricing is set by the photographer not by the host website.

If you were to tell that photographer that you had an ongoing need for images of a particular style of subject then you can be sure that they'd go out there and make more of them for you. I certainly would.

The only downside to this method is that it's possibly harder to find the images or the photographers than on other platforms but apart from that it's a win for everyone. And if you're using my work, don't you think I'm going to endlessly share it?

Last on my list is the most expensive.

Comissioned Origianl Work

It is the most expensive for a reason, it's the best of this list.

You're hiring a skilled professional who will guide you and create the right sets of images to fit your needs. Then guide you on the use of those images freeing you up to, you know, do your actualy job instead of trawling for the right photos.

It will set out a visual style and a bit of a statement.

Let me ask you a question, do you ever see connections on Linkedin bragging about how great business people they are and how successful they are?

I'm sure you do.

Do you ever go and look at their websites or their content only to find them full of microstock photos or the free ones from the likes of Unsplash/Pexels?

How does that make you feel about them?

Does that make you believe their story, does it make you trust them? Or does it make them look like cheapskates or that they're hiding behind some kind of corporate veneer with no authenticity or responsibility?

For me the impression I get is always the latter.

I hope that I've given you something to think about with this post. Photography should tell a story and get the right message across.

It can set out your values and ethics, your standards, your market position and your value.

But be careful because it can also undo all of those things if used badly.

I'll leave you with a task, I'll ask that you take a closer look at every piece of content or website that you see today. Ask yourself what impression you get from them, their choices of photos, their sources of photos. What does it say about them, are they trustworthy and quality or are they shifty and questionable?

And if your own content doesn't live up to that standard do something about it.

** Update

Getty Images issued an email saying that they were planning to phase out Rights Managed Photographs on all of their sites by November 2020. That means images will only be available by size.