Best paid photo sites?

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Pictures add something to blog posts, especially for those readers who are visually oriented. Your images don’t have to be original, expensive, gorgeous or even particularly accurate – just make sure you scale them to their proper size so they load quickly. Images are just one more way to draw a reader into your article and make it memorable.

I recommend using free photos wherever you can. Most of the time, I’m able to find something good for an article at Stock.xchng or Dreamstime‘s free section, and that’s great. I see no benefit in spending where you don’t have to.

But sometimes free photo sites just don’t have what you need, so you go to paid photos. iStockPhoto is one of the oldest and best-known sites for this kind of thing, but they’re not the only one.

Problems with iStock and Dreamstime

Last year, iStock raised the prices on their photos and illustrations to a ridiculous degree. It’s a rare day I can’t find something just as good or better than what they’re offering, for considerably less. Dreamstime is one of the places I can often find a cheaper paid image than iStock has to offer. But I got irritated with Dreamstime when they recently forced me to buy at least $9.99 in credits in order to keep using their free section. I bought it and I used the credits, but I wasn’t happy about it.

I don’t mind spending iStock prices if I’m looking for a logo or some important image. But just for something to put in an article? Forget it.

CanStock Photo

Currently, my favorite paid photo site is CanStockPhoto. They have a good selection of both photos and illustrations, and good filters to help you find exactly what you want. On most images, you can buy a small jpg in cash for $1-2, a medium for $2-3, a large for $4, and a big tiff or EPS vector for $10. But you’ll get a much better deal through their credit program, because their credits are much cheaper than iStock’s:

With iStock, the least you’ll ever pay for a credit is $1.13, and that’s if you’ve got $2250 to throw at your account. With CanStock, you get way more:

The most you pay for a credit is 50 cents. And 1 credit is equivalent to $1 – meaning, if you want an image that’s $4 by cash, you can buy it with 4 credits, and 4 credits cost you $2 or less. Or if you want a $2 image, you’ll spend $1 or less in credits. IStock is never that cheap.

What other good paid photo sites have you found?

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