Posted by Charlotte Lamb, Designer at I to Eye

If you have just started your company or if you work with services rather than products you may struggle to find images to use on your website, your brochure and flyers. This is where the growing number of companies that provide stock photography can be very useful.

Stock images are literally catalogues full of photographs grouped by theme, most of them are easy to find online. They are simple to use and the cost of using the images has fallen because there is lots of competition.

I have used iStock for many projects (www.istockphoto.com) it is a site that has members creating libraries of their images for sale (using a licence system) to customers of the site.

The site has a fairly good keyword search facility where a little dropdown menu of the kind of words it thinks you are interested in will appear after your first few letters. Once you select a keyword it will search for matching images and display 24 per page. There are also bits of film and flash files available that could be useful for multimedia projects.

The site uses a payment system where you buy credits and pay according to how large you want the image you require, for example on website design only you can often use the smallest version of the image (usually costing 1-3 credits) but on a poster or banner you may need a larger version to ensure good reproduction when it is printed. Do remember to read the small print about how the images may be used, if you want to reproduce the images on items that will be sold (like a book-jacket) then the licence may be different from the standard one.

Trying to think around the subject you are trying to illustrate, can be helpful with abstract concepts like ‘coaching’ or ‘advice’ and it may be useful to brain-storm some words to describe your subject to see what results you get by searching with them.

If you need to find the perfect images for your business but don’t have time, I to Eye provide a photo searching service, call us on 01962 737989.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 31st, 2008 at 3:35 pm and is filed under Business tips, Website Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.