Photo libraries are all over the internet now. You can find free images almost everywhere but as a designer, I find it starts eating into my day when I’m constantly searching for specific images.
Most photo libraries will offer a comprehensive search facility, but sometimes you need a lot of similar images covering a very specific niche, and when you get one of those projects, it’s better to look at the niche photo libraries. I’ve compiled a list here of some very specific niche photo libraries…
AERIAL PHOTO LIBRARIES
Jason Hawkes offers aerial photography and has been doing it since 1991. He’s produced many books for the BBC and Harper Collins and other notable people and has a catalogue of over 100,000 images. You can search the site by location of by keyword.
http://www.jasonhawkes.com
Air Photana also stock over 100,000 aerial images. Many of the images concentrate on US locations but also cover from Alaska and Labradoe to Costa Rica.
http://www.airphotona.com/
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Photolibraries that fit into the new wave of microstock web sites include istockphoto, dreamstime, shutterstock, stockxpert, big stock photo and Fotolia. These photo libraries offer images from just $1 for web based images (images that are small enough to really just be used on web sites).
iStock is currently one of the most popular microstock photo libraries and has quite a strict moderating board, so you’re not going to get sub standard images on there. You can find photos, illustrations, vectors, animations, videos, and soon to be launched - audio files.
Fotolia arrived on the scene a little later but is doing really well and has a nice clean interface.
Shutterstock seems a little clunkier in the design of the site, but it has an enormous catalogue of images.
Photo libraries are now in abundance around the world to suit all kinds of budgets. Quality licensed photo libraries such as Getty, Photolibrary and Corbis can offer you licensed images and exclusive rights images, which are based on your kind of usage.
Royalty free sites such as Digital Vision can offer cheaper images with a royalty free license. You can usually buy complete collections such as business images, lifestyle images or transport images for example.
Then we have photo libraries that fit into the microstock genre. These include sites such as istockphoto, shutterstock, dreamstime and big stock images, where you can buy images from around $1. These kinds of sites are becoming more and more popular because of the price structure and ease of use.
There are also many types of specialist image photo libraries and we’ll be looking at these soon.
The world is now full of photo libraries.