As a group of individuals we’ve been creating and applying web imagery for quite some time now and during the course of our web careers we’ve come across many different image resources. In fact, there are so many to choose from that this post was actually much harder to write than we first anticipated.

Gone are the days when you would send away for a stock photography CD and hope they had what you needed. Now it’s simply; ‘find a site that caters to your needs, sign up and start downloading’. What an easy life.

Here’s our top 5 recommended resources

…based on the following values:

• Range of snow-related photos available
• Price of images
• Artistic merit
• Usability of the web site

Please bear in mind that we haven’t purchased from every site so our usability testing really just extends search functions and navigation.

1. istockphoto

Taking the number one spot for sheer numbers. istock’s collection of winter sports, royalty free images are so in-depth that you’re bound to find something to fit your criteria.

Their prices are very reasonable starting at $1 for a 300px X 400px sized image, up to US$20 for 3300px X 4900px. However it’s not quite as simple as that – istockphoto require you to purchase credits (at time of writing this it’s 10 for US$13) which you then use to download their images. This process, although not inconvenient keeps their customers returning to the site to use up loose credits – clever chaps!

Regarding the quality of images; istock again have a huge variety from holiday snaps to top-notch professional photographs. Most images are available at 4 or 5 download sizes and all are royalty free. istock also has a strong selection of vector illustrations, flash and video. They even have a ‘dollar bin’ for those always in search of a bargain.

2. Getty Images

Coming in a close second, simply due to price. Due to the quality of their images, the prices are somewhat higher than that of istockphoto’s. You can easily pay into the hundreds of dollars for just one image depending on it’s use.

Getty Images provide both royalty free and rights managed imagery. But it doesn’t stop there, they have licensing agreements for ‘rights ready’ (a slight tweak on rights managed), creative subscription and editorial use. See their full descriptive list of licensing agreements to find out more.

Getty have a good range of winter related images with a massive focus towards professional snow sport athletes. Their site is easy to use and functional, but getting a quote for an image can be a real slog, partly due to the fact they have so many licensing variables.

3. Stock xchng

A Hungarian site billed as “The leading FREE stock photography site”, and is a very handy and reliable resource. The motivation for the site is to create a platform for: “creative people to exchange their photos for inspiration or work”. With over a million registered users and 250 thousand photos online this leads to a good variety of attractive images.

The sign-up process is quick and easy, and the clear license agreements on their free images allow them to be used in digital format on websites, multimedia presentations; and in print format on brochures, CD covers etc.

There is also a sister site, Stock Xpert, offering more professional images at competitive rates, and the better images shown on Stock Xchng usually fall into this category.

4. Shutterstock

Described as “The largest subscription-based stock photo agency in the world” – subscription being the key!. Shutterstock’s collection of winter-orientated images is strong, with a big focus towards illustrations. They have a range of ski and snowboard photographs available in 4 different sizes. All are royalty free, however they do offer an enhanced license allowing further flexibility. The web site is easy to navigate and they even offer a ‘register only’ option allowing you to search and compile a lightbox of images that you want to purchase before taking the plunge into a month-long subscription.

That bring us nicely to the subscription angle. At US$199 for one month allowing up to 25 downloads per day, it’s not unreasonable (that’s the minimum period by the way). In theory you could purchase up to 800 images in that time – rather a bargain wouldn’t you say? But what if you only need 10 or 20 images? Well then this isn’t the site for you. Ideal for a large project being performed over a long-ish duration, but not suited to the small winter tourism business in need of a few images for a quick web site or brochure refreshment.

5. Digitalrailroad Marketplace

And last but not least… Our initial reaction to Digital Railroad was very positive. It’s a great site to navigate, has a home page that provides access to well-tailored options, plus they have an abundance of quality winter tourism images – both royalty free and rights managed.

In fact, Digital Railroad are very comparable with Getty Images in terms of quality, numbers and, it seems, price too. However, this is where they begin to lose ground. I think you’ll all agree that most marketers and designers like to have quick and easy access to a products price. We all work to budgets and need to make timely decisions based what we have to spend, meaning we usually want a quote there and then. Digital Railroad’s shortfall is providing this quote. The process is time consuming and you’re required to wait for a personal email from them clarifying the image usage before finally obtaining a quote.

For me, this process is unnecessary, but then I don’t require the ‘personal touch’. For large companies purchasing multiple images on a frequent basis, I think Digital Railroad is a great source. You are allocated an account manager who is there to ease the communication process, be it over via email or telephone. This, it seems is a rarity among image-selling web sites and may be highly useful if your time is minimal but your budget extensive.

Update

In late 2008 Digital railroad closed down. This report from CNET News offers more background information.

So there you have it. Five great image-selling resources, reviewed and detailed to keep these decisions simple. We’d like to hear of any other good resources that you can recommend too.

The breakthrough of Mosaic was its ability to display images embedded on pages (rather than in a separate window) – paving the way for the web to metamorphasise from a black-and-white, Times New Roman world into the colourful, visually-rich medium it is today.

Fast-forward 15 years—through the rise of e-commerce, dot-com boom and bust, the blogoshpere, web 2.0 and the social-web—and good imagery is one of the most important aspects of success on the web.

If you are on the web to do business high-quality, relevant photography goes a long way to promote your products or services to potential customers. Along with killer content it can persuade and influence, turning visitors into buyers.

However, one of the trickiest (and often most time consuming) decisions marketers have to make when producing a new publication, whether it be print or web based, is the sourcing and selecting of photographic material. Of course, this becomes even more problematic when it’s a specific ‘niche’ that you’re promoting.

Not that winter tourism can be described as ‘niche’, but the particular image your business is looking to portray within this industry may be just that.

Finding appropriate shots is the first and, in most cases, the hardest step. There’s just so many considerations; quality, file size, colour scheme, cost, legalities of use, the list goes on.

Many of our readers will have come across at least one of these problems before. So we’ve decided it time the Tactical Thinking team bring you a series on how to source, select and utilise photographic images. To kick it off, this first post discusses the different methods of sourcing photographs and the pros and cons of each.

Use your own… who doesn’t own a camera these days?

The cheapest source of photographic imagery is probably sitting in your computer’s hard drive right now. Nowadays most people own a digital camera and some even own a digital SLR (single lens reflex). If you enjoy photography and have an eye for what looks good, this is certainly the cheapest, most realistic option available. All you need is a decent editing programme, like Adobe Photoshop, some time to learn how to use it, and you’re away.

That said there’s a big difference between your Sony Cybershot and a professional SLR camera – and the person behind the lens. If you’re in need of small ‘filler’ images for your site then your Sony Cybershot may well do the job. However, if you’re looking for larger images suitable for web page furniture like banners or, even more importantly, for printed publications, high-resolution images are essential – this is where your Cybershot just ain’t gonna cut it.

So where can you find high-res, good quality photographic images?

Well, there’s actually quite a few options here but we’ve boiled it down to four different sourcing categories for the sake of simplicity.

1. Public domain images

Described as ‘freely available’ and ‘copyright-free works’, public domain images are available at no cost. However, it is your responsibility to ensure the image you’re using is actually free-to-use. Complications here include photos of people (often requiring a model release) and of recognizable building structures.

2. Royalty free (or stock photography)

This is defined as ‘free of royalties’ and essentially means you can pay a single fee to use an image repeatedly. The amount of times a buyer can use the image is usually defined in the agreement of sale. Royalty free also means that no one can own exclusive rights to the image and the photographer can sell the image as many times as they want. As a buyer you cannot resell the image on, no matter of circumstances.

3. Rights managed (or licensed images)

As the next step up from ‘Royalty free’ this is simply just a logical increase in availability and exclusivity. Here the buyer usually pays each time the image is used in a different format or medium, but has complete exclusivity to the image for an agreed time frame. If you’re finding it hard to distinguish between Royalty free and Rights managed read more here.

4. Commission a shoot

Predominantly used by larger companies with more market spread and deeper budgets, commissioning a professional photographer for a specific shoot is certainly the most exclusive method. Most photographers charge for their time and per image that you purchase. However many provide a full-package price allowing the buyer to own all images taken during the shoot.

Right, with those definitions out of the way, let’s take a look at the pros and cons of each…

Hopefully, that’s given you enough information to roll with for time being – and will lead to some good image sourcing decisions. There’s more information to come; the next post in the series will reveal Tactical Thinking’s top 5 photographic web resources (places you can find and download images).

In the meantime, please share your thoughts and experiences on image sourcing and licensing here, so others can from learn them too.

When it comes to adding content to your website imagery is an invaluable tool for creating a visual impact, setting the theme of your site (and your company) or showing off your high-quality products. However, all of that is only possible once someone has found your site and decided to pay it a visit.

As Keith discussed in our last SEO feature one of the keys to creating a successful website is making sure it is easy for search engines to understand and describe to the audience. In essence, creating a user-experience that says the right things to your customers but in a way that also talks to the search engines, which in turn will bring those customers to you.

So what part do images play in talking to search engines and getting traffic to your site? Well, only a supporting role it has to be said, but here is an explanation of how they can play that role well.

Search engines and web content

A search engine’s goal is to provide the user with the best possible answer to the question they ask. They achieve this by sending out software programmes known as ‘robots’ or ‘spiders’ to crawl across the web tirelessly, analysing sites and indexing the results into their databases, ready to provide to a searcher on request.

This interaction between websites and spiders means the goal of a business wanting to be findable is to ensure all content is available for search engines to properly analyse and accurately index. A practice known as ‘being search engine friendly’.

Your content (text, images, multimedia etc. all combined), is essentially the message you want to communicate to your audience. So, you want to make sure the whole message goes out intact to as many people as possible. Search engines will happily do this on your behalf but will only pass on the message you give to them.

Using images to get your message across

The power of imagery — such as photos, your company’s branding or information graphics — will get the message across quickly to someone visiting your site. Although to a search engine spider, which deals in text and can’t see the contents of an image, the message stops dead.

If part of your message is only conveyed by imagery this important information will not be picked up and understood by search engines, and in turn will not be passed on to search engine users. Effectively lost in translation.

A good example would be Company-X creating an advert for a special offer they’re running on widgets. They produce an eye-catching photo of their top-of-the-range widget with the words: “Half price widgets this month only!” beautifully typeset in the graphic and publish it right in the middle of their homepage.

Unfortunately for Company-X, a search engine spider would not view the image and would simply log the fact that it’s there. The important message that “widgets are half price this month!” would not make it through to the hordes of eager widget-buyers searching the web for the best place to buy new widgets.

Providing text equivalents of non-text content

So how could Company-X make their images search engine friendly and get their important message picked up by text-only spiders? Quite simply, by optimising their images and providing text equivalents.

There are a number of ways to reinforce images with text content, ready and waiting for search engines to pick up and pass on to searchers:

• The ‘Alt’ (Alternate) attribute
  An ‘Alt’ attribute is used in HTML and XHTML to attach a text alternative to images in web pages. This allows the content editor to add a short description explaining the meaning of the image for users who can’t see it. This feature was initially designed to cater for blind users or those who have set their browser not to display images, but it is also the foremost way to explain the content of your images to search engine spiders.
• Captions and surrounding text
  Search engine spiders also look at your page for text surrounding an image as a way of working out what that image is about. In some cases it is worthwhile to include a caption next to your image. This lets you associate more information with the image that may not necessarily explain what the image is showing, but explains more about why the image is on the page.
• Image filenames
  While spiders are not able to see what is in an image, they will find the image and are perfectly able to read its filename. So bear this in mind when you’re naming the image files for use on your site. As far as search engines listings are concerned an image named ‘widget-sale-Jan2008.jpg’ will be much more explanatory than ‘widgets.jpg’.

In this example from the BBC you will see two of the above methods in action. The logo image for this UK television programme describes the subject of the article visually. The image then has the alternate text “Ski Sunday”, communicating this same theme to search engines. It is also connected to a caption reading: “Ski Sunday returns to BBC Two on 20 January”, which adds more context to the image and its relation to the story.

So that wraps up our intro on making images work for you (rather than against you), when it comes to SEO. The aim for this article was to show you the ‘what’ and ‘why’ of optimising images for search engines. Keep an eye on this SEO series for follow-up posts explaining more on the ‘how’ of working with images.