Ask HN: Where do you get your stock photography? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Where do you get your stock photography?

9 pointsbiotech10 comments

I'm looking for a place where I can pay a small fee (what is reasonable? $20?) for access to stock photography. Any suggestions? Ideally, it would be cheap, have a large selection of photos (I need pictures of people for my current app), and I need to be able to legally place them in the UI of my distributable application.

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I use Shutterstock. They have a reasonable membership plan ($224 a month for me), where you can download 25 photos / illustrations a day.

They aren't as good as iStockPhoto, but I am way too cheap to use iStockPhoto regularly. Plus I found their credit system infuriating. If you find something you like on iStockPhoto that isn't labeled exclusive, search for it on Shutterstock. Sometimes it's there for a lot less money.

For best quality and selection I use istock. Otherwise so cheap as in 0$ : flickr creative commons (http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/) , morgue file (http://www.morguefile.com/) or stock exchange (http://www.sxc.hu/)

Wikimedia Commons is messy but free, and has some good stuff if you dig (in some areas, at least). E.g.: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Textures

iStockPhoto.com is pretty popular

Ditto.. also use istock.

I use iStock, but not happy about it. The good stuff is being added to the premium and vetta collections and it's hard to find something that looks good and isn't at least 10-20 credits.

One thing I've noticed is that if you find a particular image you like but they want too many credits for it - you can google the photographers username and chances are they also have accounts on other istock clones. I did this a while back for a series of images I wanted and ended up saving a good bit because I found the exact same set on an alternative site that were much cheaper.

Alternatively you can use tineye on the comp image to find out if other sites are selling it as well.

Used them for years but every year they raise their prices that bit more. And nearly every search result displays there "Vetta" catalogue or $30 for a small image... I use dreamstime.com now.

sxc.hu

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