Death To The Stock Photo and Good Free Photos – Two More Resources For Your Designer Toolbox
Images. We’ve talked about these often. Every designer needs them, a lot of resources exist. But the cost of a professional stock photo provider can easily exceed the budget of the average small business. That’s where free services come in handy. We here at Noupe have already showcased a lot of them, still we haven’t managed to cover each and every free photo provider out there. Today we want to introduce you to “Death To The Stock Photo” and “Good Free Photos”. Both are not the conventional kind…
In doing so they started to notice that many brands, bloggers, and other freelancers had trouble consistently getting photography that was authentic and quality enough to use in production. Many of their friends were unable to afford this type of work consistently and still had anxiety about licensing.
Allison and David started small, simply just sending their photography to friends, bloggers, artists, freelancers, businesses all with the goal of helping their brand be its best self without compromising on their visual aesthetic. Today they operate a free to all service, which is not the conventional photo provider.
You cannot download anything on their website. All you can do is sign up for their newsletter. This newsletter is sent out once a month and contains a download link to an ZIP archive. This archive contains a thematically focused bunch of photos. Usually the archive weighs in at around 100 mb.
As I already mentioned, the archive is always limited to a certain topic. One month you could be equipped with a whole lot of wedding photos, another car pictures or mountain landscapes might be flooding your inbox. All the pictures are highly professional. There is no doubt about that.
So, if you have the time to wait for the perfect photo, Death To The Stock Photo might work for you. I subscribed to their service, which I can definitely recommend to you, too. But, if you need quick success, look elsewhere.
All the photos can be used freely - not only in commercial projects, also in social media, mockups, wherever you want to use it. Allison and David keep all the rights, though. Their photos are not public domain. Make sure to read their license PDF.
Chen managed to get several of his photos featured on sites like Unsplash and Pixabay, yet never managed to raise decent traffic to the site itself. I guess this will change today ;-)
One reason no one likes to surf goodfreephotos.com is its ancient design. I have seen better layouts in the 90s already. Yinan, please look for any template not older than ten years and apply it to your site. It will work wonders to your traffic.
Chen offers around a thousand images. Some of them are really good, but all in all the quality is varying. The photos are not meant to cover the whole bandwidth of what traditional stock photo providers deliver. Similar to Death To The Stock Photos the images you can get are the images Chen wanted to take.
This is not an approach to criticize, yet you need to be aware of it. Chances to find the image you need are as high as the chances to not find the image you need. Anyway, goodfreephotos.com is worth to be added to your designer’s toolbox. All the pictures are completely free to be used for any legal purpose.
Death To The Stock Photo - Collections via Email
Death To The Stock Photo is a service created and maintained by Allison Lehman and David Sherry from Columbus in Ohio, US. Both are self taught photographers, and started out by shooting photos for brands in exchange for free products.
In doing so they started to notice that many brands, bloggers, and other freelancers had trouble consistently getting photography that was authentic and quality enough to use in production. Many of their friends were unable to afford this type of work consistently and still had anxiety about licensing.
Allison and David started small, simply just sending their photography to friends, bloggers, artists, freelancers, businesses all with the goal of helping their brand be its best self without compromising on their visual aesthetic. Today they operate a free to all service, which is not the conventional photo provider.
You cannot download anything on their website. All you can do is sign up for their newsletter. This newsletter is sent out once a month and contains a download link to an ZIP archive. This archive contains a thematically focused bunch of photos. Usually the archive weighs in at around 100 mb.
As I already mentioned, the archive is always limited to a certain topic. One month you could be equipped with a whole lot of wedding photos, another car pictures or mountain landscapes might be flooding your inbox. All the pictures are highly professional. There is no doubt about that.
So, if you have the time to wait for the perfect photo, Death To The Stock Photo might work for you. I subscribed to their service, which I can definitely recommend to you, too. But, if you need quick success, look elsewhere.
All the photos can be used freely - not only in commercial projects, also in social media, mockups, wherever you want to use it. Allison and David keep all the rights, though. Their photos are not public domain. Make sure to read their license PDF.
Death To The Stock Photo | Homepage
Good Free Photos - Public Domain, But Patchy
Yinan Chen from Madison in Wisconsin, US, has taken the last two years of his life to put together a collection of the best of his photos to release them into the public domain. His site goodfreephotos.com basically is a photo documentary of state parks, national parks, cities, animals, plants and food, categorized by location and species. Many of the photos are HDR blended.
Chen managed to get several of his photos featured on sites like Unsplash and Pixabay, yet never managed to raise decent traffic to the site itself. I guess this will change today ;-)
One reason no one likes to surf goodfreephotos.com is its ancient design. I have seen better layouts in the 90s already. Yinan, please look for any template not older than ten years and apply it to your site. It will work wonders to your traffic.
Chen offers around a thousand images. Some of them are really good, but all in all the quality is varying. The photos are not meant to cover the whole bandwidth of what traditional stock photo providers deliver. Similar to Death To The Stock Photos the images you can get are the images Chen wanted to take.
This is not an approach to criticize, yet you need to be aware of it. Chances to find the image you need are as high as the chances to not find the image you need. Anyway, goodfreephotos.com is worth to be added to your designer’s toolbox. All the pictures are completely free to be used for any legal purpose.
Such helpful tips! Thanks for posting, Dieter.
I understand your point of view and maybe the stock photography business has to redefine itself but when even creatives start to no longer charge each other for work – how is this supposed to work then? Free photos, videos, icons, design templates, websites etc.. Everyone is giving work away for free – I really don’t understand why..
These new services are created with heart and mind, while the generic stock photo provider does not offer photography, but photo-optical staple goods.
Totally agrees with Erwin, as a creative we have to make money to eat and live, anyway they photography on offer is from students and amateurs, you can tell the difference between them and a professional photographer, in a way they like those model websites that promises young naïve models a career in modelling, in this case photographic students and the like…