I love iStock. I do mostly b2b communications and technical writing, and I always find the best on iStock when I can’t illustrate something eye catching with a screen shot or a diagram.

Also, I found http://www.123rf.com/ to have a number of nice photos that I couldn’t find at istock.

I’ve also use http://www.dreamstime.com/

I’ve tried some other sites, but since many of the images elsewhere are found on iStock as well, there isn’t a real need to duplicate my efforts. I agree with ALL your reasons to love the site and will also add “ease of use” as a big plus. The ability to create as many “lightboxes” (think ‘save for later’ lists) as you need helps me organize my potential downloads and searching can be quite specific to avoid having to look through 5,962 images to find the one you want.

Larger size images, for reproduction in print, have gotten a bit “pricey” compared to the $1 a pic price for smaller sizes, but I’ve been in the business long enough to remember paying several hundred dollars for the rights to one photo! So $5 or $6 is not going to break my budget. At these prices, there is absolutely NO excuse for anyone to violate copyright laws when it comes to photos.

The only downside to these and simliar sites is that it made me realize how amateurish my own photographic efforts were. Guess I’ll stick to writing and editing!

I quit using stock.xchange because they’ve pushed most of their free pictures that are worth anything over to istockphoto. I use stockxpert as a first resource for images, then istockphoto for the heavy-hitting stuff. Their (iStock) video clips are solid too (but a little pricey). istockphoto is very reasonable compared to Getty, who now owns istockphoto. You’ll see that all those sites lead you through a growing dependency on better and better images!

Thanks,

s.c.

When I started blogging, I didn’t know much about Creative Commons or Flickr, so I got my images from iStockphoto. Now I mainly use Flickr, but I’ll often end up back on iStockphoto if I can’t find something specific.

One thing of note – when you deposit funds into your Istockphoto account, they only last a year. If you don’t use all your credit within the year, you lose it. They do remind you but its still worthy of mentioning.

Andrew