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5 great photo resources for clients

When you get to the content stage of your new website, a lot of unexpected costs can pop-up. More often than not, clients won’t necessarily have their own image library to choose from when populating the site, and this can be quite a costly exercise if you don’t know about some of the more secret corners of the internet! The big hitters for stock photos (iStock, shutterstock etc.) could see you spending as much as £20 an image, and even the subscription packages work out at £5-8 per photo. There’s two sides to this; 1) It’s expensive, and 2) There’s a lot of pressure to pick the right image, knowing that if you get it wrong, you’re going to have to fork out a fair chunk for another photo.

Below is a list of resources that are available to you to populate your site with some great photos, at a reasonable cost.

1. Unplash – Free

Unsplash wins the award of the best place to start for stock photos. It’s free, the images are of a brilliant quality, there’s a wide array of choice and did I mention it’s free? At the very least, if you don’t find what you want, it has cost you nothing! You don’t even need to give credit for the photos (it falls under the Creative Commons license), although I would still recommend doing so where possible!

https://unsplash.com

2. Pexels – Free

Pexels is very similar to unsplash, another brilliant free resource under the Creative Commons license. The only reason it’s number 2 is that I discovered it more recently, so haven’t had as much time to look through the catalogue. Looking good so far though!

https://www.pexels.com/

3. Death to Stock – Free | $15/month

Death to Stock also offers free stocks, albeit on a more limited basis (you sign up via your e-mail, random stocks then get sent to that e-mail address). The subscription package is $15 a month, offers over 1500 images and more importantly, offers sets of photos, which is great for continuity throughout your website.

http://deathtothestockphoto.com/

4. Envato – $29/month

Envato in general is a great resource for the creative community, offering almost anything you can think of from a designer or developer point of view. However, they’ve now released a Netflix-esque subscription service, with almost 250,000 images available for only $29 a month. This is only just out, so i’ve not had a chance to even scrape the surface, but that’s an incredible offering no matter which way you look at it. It has a great tool for searching based on colour, which will be very handy for sites that follow very specific colour schemes!

https://elements.envato.com/photos

5. Pikwizard – Free

Pikwizard is a new resource that i’ve found in 2018, offering a different selection of stock images found on other mainstream websites.

https://pikwizard.com/

Do you have your own preferred photo/stock resources? Share them in the comments!

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