When people don’t have time to take pictures of something for a project they’re working on, they turn to an elite stock photography service to get the pictures they need. These services have millions of royalty free or rights managed images available for editorial, electronic or commercial purposes. Some services provide rights protected, hard to obtain or commissioned images by photographers while others offer reasonable subscriptions that provide users with hundreds of royalty free downloads each month.

You can gain access to millions of images from multiple collections, get prices for each one right away and have them on your computer in a matter of moments. These services provide account management tools to help you monitor usage and expiration dates. Finding the image you’re looking for is made easy with the advanced search options most services offer. You can pool the images you purchase together to gain inspiration for your next work of art.

In this site, you will find articles on stock photography, comprehensive reviews and a side-by-side comparison to help you find out which service is right for you and fits your publishing needs.

What to Look For in a Stock Photography Service

When searching for the right stock photography service, you must first consider how you’re going to use the image. Some images require you to keep them at a certain resolution or size for quality purposes or your project may need a specific license.

Once you figure out how you’re going to use the picture, you can narrow down your image search to meet the criteria of that purpose. The more options a service gives you to narrow down your search, the more relevant the results of that search are going to be.

WebCreator used the following criteria to evaluate each stock photography service:

Features
The features a stock photography service has to offer need to be as varied as the tastes and talents of the artists themselves. A service that provides a lot of useful features is going to have a lot more staying power than one that doesn’t. Creative people change their direction on a dime, so the service you choose needs to progress with you.

Search/Sort Options
A site that’s loaded with millions upon millions of images but has lousy search options isn’t going to last long. The images they have to offer will be rendered useless because customers can’t find them. A site with excellent search options will truly have some staying power. Users will enjoy being able to find the images they need effortlessly.

Quality
The phrase “quality, not quantity” could definitely be applied to stock photography services. You could offer more images than your nearest competitor, but their quality beats yours by a mile. In the end, you’re going to fade out while the service with the better quality images will prevail. Users will expect quality images because they want their projects to be quality as well.
Selection
People that come to a stock photography service have unique tastes and reasons for needing a stock photograph. Your ideal service needs to provide a wide enough selection to meet the demands of every undertaking. They need to be as diverse as the people they’re serving.

Savvy users might want to seek to use several different services, such as royalty free, rights protect and assignment photography images. Be sure to check out who landed in top three in the battle to find the best stock photography service: Getty Images, iStockPhoto.com