Royalty Free Images

[gstk]

How do you really know if an image is Royalty Free? Or is it just a dice with death. You see these images on web sites and they state royalty free but you never quite know.

[Paul]

sometimes you can see it in picture exif. exif is written by author

[JSR]

Royalty free doesn't always mean "free". Your safest bet is probably to go to microstock sites. They sell "Royalty Free" images and you can check permitted uses on the license agreement.

I use them precisely because you can rarely be sure what free sites really mean by "royalty free". They generally mean "royalty free" for non-commercial use because they figure that, if you're making money from them, then they want a slice of the action.

If you use a microstock site, then you know what your rights are and what price you need to pay from day one.

[logobear]

can you show us some links to 'microstock' sites?
From your experience, what scale of charges might I expect for different types on use, - in UK, in 2012
I don't mind if you are vague, but some £value numbers would be helpful.
Thanks

[JackB]

http://microstockinsider.com/site_reviews

There you go.

Jack.

[JSR]

can you show us some links to 'microstock' sites?
From your experience, what scale of charges might I expect for different types on use, - in UK, in 2012
I don't mind if you are vague, but some £value numbers would be helpful.
Thanks

I use Dreamstime myself, because they allow the use of their images on book covers (and that's what I needed first when looking for RF images).

Price depends on what you want to use them for, what size you want them, and how many you buy (you can subscribe to have cheaper per-image cost).

If you only want images for advertising purposes (on your website, for example) then you can get the smaller sizes for almost pennies. If you want to sell them as part of a product, you can expect to pay a lot more. And if you want exclusive rights (so no one else can use the image) then you will be paying significantly more.

License restriction limits you to a total number of uses (standard license covers 500,000 impressions, I think, and extended license for use on products covers 10,000). If you want more impressions you just buy the image again.

I've used some for book covers and for advertising on my website. I'm considering using some on actual product designs to sell, but I haven't gone down that road just yet.

Hope this helps.