Customer Service
Pricing
Licensing
Ease of Use
Value
iStockphoto Stock Photography
The QuickFacts
| Products offered: | Audio, video, illustrations, and stock photos. | Pros: |
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| Pricing structure: | Points. Points may be purchased subscription-style or one-off packages. | ||
| Delivery type: | Varies with product type. | Cons: |
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| Overall Rating: |
Excellent pictures and large selection. Odd pricing structure. | Customer service: | Site is easy to navigate and advanced filtering. Direct contact with customer service through phone and help ticket system. More than adequate but not exceptional. |
Click here to visit iStockPhoto
The Details
iStockphoto is a supplier of licensed stock photography, images, video, flash, and illustrations. As I haven’t purchased anything from them in the past but stock photography, it’s all I’ll discuss here. Their stock is large, varied, and high quality enough to be worth working around an unusual pricing structure.
Their pictures come in all sizes, and their idea of very large is several thousand pixels to a side. This also includes drawings such as vector image and Photoshopped illustrations that would work for the web. You can search by an advanced filtering set in the sidebar which includes:
- Whether a picture is portrait, landscape, or square
- Where you want your text to go so the picture has space for you to put it. It appears as a 9-square box, and you just click the sections you want blank
- Size
- Category
- Primary background color by Hexadecimal value
- Illustration complexity by checkbox (five categories total from their idea of basic to elaborate)
- And keyword. You can filter by all of the above and keep narrowing to selection you want
The picture will also pop up if you hover over it for a closer look at the flick of a mouse. Between that and the filter, it was easy to find a header image in my chosen category with enough blank space for my text. A little effort in the filter makes searches match very well with what it is you want, or think you might want.
Licensing is broad enough for many uses but it is not PLR. Licenses come in Standard and Extended. If you buy a picture, it automatically has standard licensing, but if you need more you have to purchase Extended extra. With Standard licensing, it’s best to keep your uses for their photographs digital. They’ve improved the licensing explanation from the last time I was there, but it’s still lengthy and can be read here.
The pricing structure is a bit odd. Instead of purchase by a direct item or subscription charge, it’s by points. Points can only be bought in one-off packages or in monthly subscriptions. The smallest package is more than you’ll need for a site header and possibly other images to a splash page, but is affordable enough to be worth any addition cost. When I bought the smallest points package, I was informed they would last for a year. I then purchased my image and banked the rest.
Customer service provides numbers to call and an easy-to-use online help ticket generator. I put in a test ticket for a licensing question, and it was answered in two business days to my satisfaction. Their customer service is slightly above average and will serve, but is not exceptional.
Overall, the images at iStockphoto are of good quality and easy to filter. The pricing structure is inconvenient, but worth the irritation if you need a small quantity of licensed images for web sites and don’t want the hassle of a subscription. However, they’re purchasing packages are very scalable to larger users who may consume enough images over time to make it worthwhile. I recommend image use in conjuction with your personal or commercial web site projects only, and not for product use or distribution.
Click here to visit iStockPhoto
