Buy photos, images, pictures

Royalty-free photography means you save money. Royalty free allows you to use your licensed stock image unlimited times for one price. Graphic designers, web designers, art directors and other creative professionals use stock photos and illustrations in web sites, brochures, print advertising and much more. There are hundreds of royalty free stock photography sites out there. All you have to do is choose one. When looking for the right site to buy pictures you should pay attention to a few things:

• What kind of pictures do you need? Is it people and lifestyle, business, wildlife, nature, technology, backgrounds, art, science, plants and flowers, underwater photos or something else? You have to search for a site that has the photos you are looking for. Fortunately there are stock agencies that cover almost every photo category. You will find general stock sites containing many photo categories (like Shutterstock, Dreamstime or Fotolia), or dedicated sites specialized for a particular type of photography. Fore more information see our stock photography sites list.
• How do you pay for the images you buy? You should carefully read the stock photography site agreement to learn what payment method is required. Usually you can purchase images online with a credit card, but you can also pay by Pay Pal, InVoice, etc. Some sites ask you to purchase a package of credits for a certain fee and use the credits to download photos. The bigger the package or the number of pictures you download, the smaller is the fee you will pay, so you can save some money if you purchase a bigger number of photos.
• How many photos do you need and how often? If you need a big number of images, if you constantly need to download images or if you like to download as many photos as you like and than choose the right one, you should consider a subscription based stock photography agency. These sites ask you to pay a subscription for a certain period of time (1, or more months, 1 year) and than you can download daily a certain number of images. For example, Shutterstock offers a one month subscription for 125.94 euro and you can download 25 images per day (maximum 750 per month); on Can Stock Photo buyers may purchase several types of subscriptions depending on duration (weekly, monthly, yearly) and volume (10 images/day, 25 images/day).
  If you only need a small number of images and only occasionally, you should consider buying pictures directly by single download, without a subscription. But keep in mind that this way you will have to pay a bigger fee per image. Another way to buy pictures is by purchasing a CD image collection from a stock photography site. One site that sells images on CD is Fotosearch.
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• What is the quality and size of the pictures I buy? Quality and image size are very important especially if you plan to make a big print of the photo. Most royalty free stock photography site sell images at more than 2 MP or 3 MP. Usually, stock agencies sell the same image at different resolutions and different prices (the bigger the image size, the bigger the price is). If you plan to use an image for web, than you should ask for smaller images (for example 800x600 pixels) because they work just fine for web sites. General stock photography sites usually sell good or medium quality images for small fees. Of course if you take the time to search the database you will have the chance to find some very good quality photos on these sites. If you really want great quality images you will have to pay more money. For example, Image Vortex, sells photos for prices between 20 and 300 dollars, but they work with professional photographers and offer great images.