Last week, “I profiled Big Stock Photo”:https://smileycat.com/miaow/archives/000187.html as being a worthy competitor to iStockphoto. Well, I’ve since come across “Fotolia”:http://www.fotolia.com/ – another iStockphoto clone.
Fotolia is currently the smallest of the three sites, with around 125,000 photos in their database.
However, they do have all the usual functionality as far as their site is concerned. In fact, for good or ill, Fotolia is more ‘web 2.0’ than their competitors, with “tag clouds”:http://www.fotolia.com/tags/ and a ‘suggest’ feature built into their search engine, which is actually pretty useful if you’re not quite sure what search terms to use.
They also provide email alerts and RSS feeds for your searches, although I’m not sure how useful this would be.
Prices start a little cheaper than their two competitors, at $1 per image (although for web usage, prices can go up to $50 – not that I found any images at that amount). They also have an affiliate program for members.
Their Alexa ranking is currently 10706 – it’ll be interesting how they fare against Big Stock Photo over the coming months.
Okay, that’s enough about cheap stock photography. I promise.
I use istockphoto a lot and I didn’t know about fotolia till now. I definetely dig fotolia’s bigger pop-up image preview. On istockphoto sometimes it’s hard to tell what you are looking at. Thanks for the post.
Jeff – there are a lot of these community-based stock photo sites on the web now. Take a look at the Google ads on this page for example – I did and found several that I hadn’t heard of before.
The quality is also generally very good. If I was on a limited budget I would definitely start with these sites rather than spend hours sifting through all the free photo sites in search of that perfect image – it’s just not worth the time wasted.