Finding the right image

[Discovery]

This may not be the best home for this post, so I'm sorry for the square fit. However, I know that many of us here hunt for good images for our ads on a regular basis. We have used iStockPhoto for many years and their pricing and images have been great.

Unfortunately with their popularity it happens quite often that we find the images we are using being used by competitors. Also, since being acquired by getty Images, iStockPhoto has been steadily increasing prices, increasing restrictions (your credits expire after 1 year), and decreasing the size of your images.

We used to pay $1 for 1 credit and be able to purchase a 1.29 MB image for 1 credit. Fantastic. Now a 1 credit image is much much smaller 493px 293px for $1.37 US. The same 1.29MB image is 5 credits or $6.85. IStockPhoto is still a good site, with a great photographer base, but GettyImages is taking it back to the old over-inflated pricing model. Remember the days of paying $800 or more for a stock photo of some business guy with a blank poster board in his hand? Or paying for clip art? Ha!

I came across a UK based site called 123rf.com. The site is what istockphoto used to be. Its fast, full of great pictures and has a great search function. Best of all they are still at $1 per credit and 1 credit gets you a 72 DPI Web image 873 x 582 px for $1. Or get a high res 300DPI image for only $2. This should meet just about anyones need for a web ad.

The added benefit is that this site may offer a new set of images that are not being used in your industry. So you get a cheaper price and a better chance at a unique photo.

Any other sites you recommend?

Cheers - Discovery

[BasicECommerce]

Great announcement Discovery. I've seen and used this site once or twice for images and agree with you bragging about them. They are very similar to iStockPhoto.
I'm just waiting for Flickr to try a similar format to this. Last I checked, you could 'share' images but it was a hastle to 'get' images to edit and use effectively. Hopefully they'll improve their system and/or model to incorporate a structure like iStockPhoto.