What is stock photography, and how can i use it in my project, best sites to buy stock photography - update 2019

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If you are graphic designer, or web developer, or maybe a writer who need illustration for a book that you are working on, you will probably ask your self do i need to pay someone to take photos, or draw illustration that i need, or there is a cheaper solution. The answer is , Yes, there is.

There are a lot of websites which are selling stock photography / illustration. So what exactly is stock photography? Well, stock photo is photograph / illustration that is already created by artist and can be used in a many different ways depending on project needs. They can be generic ( like web site icons, signs, portraits. landscapes) or conceptual where artist is presenting one or more interesting subject. Stock photos (stock photography) are professional photographs of common places, landmarks, nature, events or people that are bought and sold on a royalty-free basis and can be used and reused for commercial design purposes. Photographer/Artist has ownership to the images, and the commercial designer has some limited usage of the photo (which is set out in the Terms of Service by the company you purchase the stock photos from) Mostly they can be licensed as : Royalty Free, Rights Managed, and Extended

Royalty Free images are NOT FOR FREE -

This means that you need to pay small amount of money for it but you dont need to pay any other fee for using it, and when you buy it once you may use it in as many project as you want as long as they are not for large amount of printing where you need to pay for extended license. The bad side of royalty free stock photography is that licensing is cheep and they are not exclusively licensed, so any other person can buy it as well and us it in their own project.

Rights Managed

They are not cheap and popular as royalty free stock photography, but they can grant you exlusive usage rights.RM license is customized to your specific usage needs. It gives you rights to use images in a determined way, for a certain period of time, in a particular geographic region, and for a limited distribution/reproduction volume. It's possible to exclusivity usage rights, and assure you'll be the only person using the image, for a limited time.However, these parameters are not preset, and you can ask for the exact rights to cover your intended use. RM images are commonly more expensive than RF, and their cost varies depending on the rights you include, falling anywhere from $50 up to thousands of dollars.

Extended / Enhanced licenses

Extended license may include the right to increase the limit of copies or reproductions of the image, or eliminate it completely by giving you unlimited copies; to use the image in items for resale (print-on-demand products, calendars, t-shirts and other merchandising, greeting cards, etc); to allow more people to access the downloaded images and work on them, before they are in use (Standard license states only the owner of the license can access the images); and allow for other methods of distribution and use.

Extended licenses are more expensive than Standard RF. They are however very useful when you want to get more rights than those of the Standard RF, but you don't want to go through the process of setting up a custom RM license, which could also be more expensive than an Extended

Here are some of the sites where you can search for photos illustrations, 3d models, videos that you need for your project....