Stock photography consists of existing photographs that can be licensed for specific uses. Publishers, advertising agencies, graphic artists, and others use stock photography to fulfill the needs of their creative assignments.
While a photographer makes money through photography a customer who uses stock photography instead of hiring a photographer can save time and money, but can also sacrifice creative control. Stock images can be presented in searchable online databases, purchased online, and delivered via download or email.
A collection of stock photography may also be called a photo archive, picture library, image bank or photo bank. As modern stock photography distributors often carry stills, video, and illustrations, none of the existing terminology provides a perfect match.
Industry structure
Images are filed at an agency that negotiates licensing fees on the photographer's behalf in exchange for a percentage, or in some cases owns the images outright. This is increasingly done online, especially with the newer micro-stock models.
Pricing is determined by size of audience or readership, how long the image is to be used, country or region where the images will be used and whether royalties are due to the image creator or owner. Often, an image can be licensed for less than $200, or in the case of the microstock photography websites as little as $1.
With Rights Managed stock photography an individual licensing agreement is negotiated for each use. Royalty-free stock photography offers a photo buyer the ability to use an image in an unlimited number of ways for a single license fee. The client may, however, request "exclusive" rights, preventing other customers from using the same image for a specified length of time or in the same industry. Such sales can command many thousands of dollars, both because they tend to be high-exposure and because the agency is gambling that the image would not have made more money had it remained in circulation. However, with royalty free licensing there is no option for getting exclusive usage rights.
Some stock photography sites offer low-resolution photography free for the purpose of preparing advertising comps to demonstrate a design. If the advertiser decides to use the image, the rights to use the high-resolution image then can be negotiated.
Professional stock photographers place their images with one or more stock agencies on a contractual basis, with a defined commission basis and for a specified contract term. Some photographers fund their own photo shoots, or develop imagery in cooperation with an agency, while others submit photographs originally produced as part of editorial (magazine) or commercial assignments.
Overview
Royalty-free
"Free" in this context means "free of royalties (paying each time you use an image)". It does not mean the image is free to use without purchasing a license or that the image is in the public domain.
Pay a one-time fee to use the image multiple times for multiple purposes (with limits).
No time limit on when the buyer can use an image.
No one can have exclusive rights of a Royalty-free image (the photographer can sell the image as many times as he wants).
A Royalty-free image usually has a limit to how many times the buyer can reproduce it. For example, a license might allow the buyer to print 500,000 brochures with the purchased image. The amount of copies made is called the print run. Above that print run the buyer is required to pay a fee per brochure, usually 1 to 3 cents. Magazines with a large print run cannot use a standard Royalty-free license and therefore they either purchase images with a Rights-managed license or have in-house photographers.
Rights-managed
(sometimes called "licensed images")
The buyer must pay each time he uses the image.
There is a time limit on how long a buyer has exclusive use of an image (usually one year). This allows the photographer to sell exclusive rights to the image again when the first buyer's time limit is up.
The buyer must choose a Rights-managed license if the buyer wants exclusive use of an image. The photographer would not be allowed to sell the image to anyone else if exclusivity is part of the license. Not all Rights-managed licenses are exclusive, that must be stipulated in the agreement.
Fee is based on such things as exclusivity, distribution, length of time used, geographic location of use.
A Rights-managed image usually allows a much larger print run per image than a Royalty-free license.
Editorial is a form of rights-managed license when there are no releases for the subjects. Since there are no releases the images cannot be used for advertising or to depict controversial subjects, only for news or educational purposes.
Features
An important feature of web-based stock photography collections is that the images have been embedded with meta-data, therefore making the images searchable by using keywords.
History
One of the first major stock photography agencies was the one founded in 1920 by H. Armstrong Roberts, which continues today under the name RobertStock.
For many years, stock photography consisted largely of outtakes ("seconds") from commercial magazine assignments. By the 1980s, it had become a specialty in its own right, with photographers creating new material for the express purpose of submitting it to a stock house. Agencies attempted to become more sophisticated about following and anticipating the needs of advertisers and communicating these needs to photographers. Photographs were composed with more of an eye for how they might look when combined with other elements; for example, a photo might be shot vertically with space at the top and down the left side, with the conscious intention that it might be licensed for use as a magazine cover. Leading agencies during this time included The Image Bank, SuperStock, Comstock Images, FPG, Index Stock Imagery which was recently acquired by The Photolibrary Group, and Masterfile.
In the 1990s, a period of consolidation followed, with Getty Images and Corbis becoming the two largest companies as a result of acquisitions. Today, stock photography companies have largely moved online. In the early 2000s, Jupitermedia Corporation has started buying some of the smaller players in the market, aggregating them under the banner of their Jupiterimages division, and became the third largest player in the market. The availability of the internet provided a means for other, smaller companies to get foothold in the industry. One such company is Alamy who has since become a significant competitor in the market with over 9 million pictures in its gallery.
In the 2000s the microstock photography industry, led by iStockPhoto and later ShutterStock, Dreamstime, Fotolia, and BigStockPhoto emerged as a rapidly growing market. Using the Internet as their sole distribution method, and recruiting mainly amateur and hobbyist photographers from around the globe, these companies are able to offer stock libraries of good quality for very low prices.
In 2003 ShutterPoint pioneered the open access model which allowed everyone to upload and market images. The trend was continued by fotoLibra in 2004 and in 2005 Scoopt started a photo news agency for citizen journalism enabling the public to upload and sell breaking news images taken with cameraphones; in France, Tinepix is launched.
Microstock photography
Microstock photography or Micro Stock Photography is an offshoot of traditional stock photography. What defines a company as a microstock photography company is that they (1) source their images almost exclusively via the Internet, (2) do so from a wider range of photographers than the traditional stock agencies (including a willingness to accept images from "amateurs" and hobbyists), and (3) sell their images at a very low rate (anywhere from $.20 - $10) for a royalty-free image.
A number of microstock sites also sell vector art, and some sell Flash animations and video, as well as images.
History
The pioneer of microstock photography was Bruce Livingstone, who created iStockPhoto, originally a free stock photo site that quickly became an industry phenomenon. Livingstone sold iStockphoto to Getty Images in February 2006 for $50 million USD.
Tools to help support the micro stock photographer have also started to emerge, including the Micro Stock Monitor tool which is a plugin for Firefox browsers and reports on your sales and viewing statistics from a range of different micro stock websites.
Practices
Each microstock company uses a different pricing and payment scheme. Photographers can upload the same pictures on multiple sites or, with some agencies, become an exclusive supplier and receive an increased commission.
There is no fee to post photos on a microstock site. However, microstock companies do not accept everyone or all photographs. Each employs a team of reviewers who check every picture submitted for technical quality, as well as artistic and commercial merit. Photographers add keywords that help potential buyers filter and find pictures of interest.
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