Until last week, I was a staunch supporter of iStockPhoto.com.
At three credits for a low-res image suitable for blogging, it was my go-to resource for stock photography. Depending on how many credits I purchased at a time, it would run from $1.59 to $2 per credit - so my image would cost $4.50 - $6.00. Not too bad. I can live with that.
But last week, we broke up. I'm not giving them my monetary love any longer.
Why? They changed their pricing structure to one credit per image, with a price leap to $15 per credit. They are now selling only high-resolution images, instead of letting the customer chose the size they wanted and spending fewer credits for lower resolution. Not only is the cost twice as much (I'd be spending over $100 on images each month!), but I would now have to spend time resizing each image. After all, larger images take more time to download, significantly reducing website performance (and hence, SEO results).
NO, THANK YOU.
I'm not much of a photographer and am often short on time, so creating my own images wasn't much of an option. I went in search of a new vendor for stock photography. Enter, Dollar Photo Club.
One dollar images! Love at first sight!!
Well, second sight, actually. I had to check out their inventory to make sure it was sizable enough to cover my needs and of decent quality. So far, so good! Like a dollar store, it's a mix-up of fantastic bargains and over-priced junk.
I also like Canva quite a bit - instead of a simple stock photography site, Canva is an image editing tool designed to be used for social media, content marketing and other uses. It allows you to buy images for one dollar as you are using the graphic design software, or use solid colors and your own images for free. If you haven't taken a look at it yet, go check it out.
Just How Important Are Images?
Very.
25 Free Tools to Rock Visual Marketing from ThriveHive
In addition to the above SlideShare that has some freebie resources to check out, here are a few more resources to explore... Just in case my one-word answer to "Just how important are visuals" wasn't enough for you. (Picky, picky.)
- Hubspot - 19 Reasons You Should Include Visual Content In Your Marketing
- Wishpond - 10 Reasons Visual Content Will Dominate 2014
- Short but sweet Google+ Post by Randy Milanovic
- Heidi Cohen - Five Facts Prove Visual Content is a Guaranteed Winner
In addition to the above SlideShare that has some freebie resources to check out, here are a few more resources to explore... Just in case my one-word answer to "Just how important are visuals" wasn't enough for you. (Picky, picky.)