All right. 1
So, where to find good photos? 2
There are free and paid sources. 3
My favorite free site is Unsplash.com. 4
You have already used this in the assignments. 5
There are many sites that offer free photos, but they're not fully free. 6
They come with some copyright rules. Like you must credit the author. Or only for personal use but not 7
for commercial use. 8
Unsplash is truly free. 9
You can do whatever you want with the photos. And you don't have to credit the author. Photos on Unsplash.com 10
are very realistic looking. A lot of times they are submitted by individual photographers around 11
the world and not by stock photo studios. 12
For this reason, you get very realistic scenarios and people that look genuine and real. Well at least 13
most of the time. Another decent free website that I use is Pexels.com. Pexels is fully free 14
as well. No limitations. 15
The concept and photo styles are very similar to Unsplash, but you get a bit more diversity here. 16
Free photo sites have a downside though. Everybody uses them. 17
And a particularly good looking photo will be used by a lot of people around the world. 18
So the photos that you use in your web designs, can easily be used by a lot of other web designers for 19
their websites. 20
At some point when you go through a lot of these free photos from Unsplash or Pexels and other places, 21
you start recognizing them in many different websites. 22
And if the audience sees this photo being used on other websites too, it sort of cheapens the 23
website. 24
It's not that unique anymore. Although the same applies to the page stock sites. But because they are 25
paid, significantly less amount of designers will be using these photos for their websites. 26
Plus the stock sites have way bigger selection of photos than the free sites. 27
So for this reason on well-paid projects, I would definitely recommend you to use paid sources instead 28
of free photos. 29
My favorite from paid stock site is iStock. 30
They have one of the best quality photos. With realistic looking models and scenes. 31
But of course you get fake looking photos here too. 32
It's unavoidable as long as people are buying that crap. 33
I can't really put an exact number on how much a photo cost on a stock site. Because it all depends on 34
how many you buy, subscription plans, and sometimes on the image itself. 35
iStock is a little on the pricier side. An image here cost between $9 to $24 . But then with 36
bundles and monthly subscription, you can get pretty good discounts. Another good paid sources is 37
Shutterstock and it's much cheaper than iStock. With their pre-paid plans, 38
you get an image for $10 tops. Prepaid means buying a pack, like $50 for 5 images. 39
For heavy users, you can get a monthly subscription, you'll get a certain amount of free images per 40
month. That can come down to $3 per image and less. One of the cheapest, but decent options is 41
Bigstock.com. Here the maximum should be about $3 per image with package bundles. 42
Unlike others, Bigstock has a 7 day free trial, that gives you 35 images for free during 43
that trial period. 44
Keep in mind though, they ask for credit card details and you have to cancel it before the last day, or 45
you'll get charged. 46
Take all this pricing information with a grain of salt, because these are independent websites and their 47
pricing can change very often. 48
And also, it will depend on the country where you're from, or where you're checking the prices due to 49
the taxes and VAT. 50
But in the ballpark, this is how the pricing works for these 3 websites and many other paid stock 51
sites. 52
I have put the links to these websites both free and paid and a little more, in the resources page. So, 53
you can feel free to check them out.