Images is a stock photography service that offers expressive and conceptually focused rights managed and royalty free images. They have access to some exclusive collections including Stock Illustration Source, Graphicstock, Spots Illustration, Ablestock, Keith Levit, Affordable Illustration and Image Zoo. Images.com is the perfect choice for designers who are primarily interested in high quality illustrations. The site looks a little limited at first, but once you click through a few pages you will end up where you need to be.
Standout Features
- Product Selection
- Product Quality
- Interesting Web Design
Images offers some extraordinary images, however, the rights managed images can get a little pricey. The royalty free images cost much less than the licensed, for example, we looked at two pictures of dogs one was nearly $800 for less than a year's use but the royalty free was only $89.
They offer all types of licensing including rights managed or protected, royalty free and model released. They include some media management tools such as a lightbox, shopping cart and the ability to save a low quality copy for experimentation. You can also email your lightbox to others for preview.
However, they do not have assignment photographers available or the ability to burn custom CDs of your selected images.
Images makes the designer's job easier by providing some excellent search options. Through this site, you can search by keyword or theme, photographer, collection, release status, color or black/white, orientation or color name.
The images included in images.com selection are above industry standards for stock photography. They include some exclusive collections of illustrations including Image Zoo, Graphicstock, Affordable Illustration and Spots Illustration.
Images offers a wide variety of quality illustrations and conceptual type images. However, they are not a good source if you are looking for vector images, cutout or isolated images or editorial photos. They have a decent selection of photos, but it doesn't matter because you will have a hard time figuring out where they're hiding the one you need.
Images is one of the best sources we have found for compelling and innovative illustrations. However, if you need assignment photographers, editorial images or custom CDs see Getty or Jupiter Images.
