Learning about Creative Commons and Stock Photography

As we prepare to launch TeachStreet, we’ve started to discuss the question about how to spice the place up a bit… you know, photos for class and teacher pages, richer content about subjects and locations, etc. We’re hoping that over time 99% of this content will come from our teacher and student users, but we can’t have it looking like a ghost town at launch!

Photo: Creative Commons – laszlo-photo

So, we’ve discussed our options, and done a lot of reading about stock photography, creative commons licenses, and other options around digital photography. To save others some of this time, I thought I’d share what I learned, and offer some links to online resources.

Premium Stock Photography

First, there’s always the ‘pay for the rights’ option, which makes total sense — great photos come from great photographers, who need to pay their bills like the rest of us! After doing a little research, you’ll quickly find that the stock photographers range from pricey to more affordable.

The top names in the more expensive category are probably Getty Images and Corbis, but you’ll find a plethora — prices for the rights to use their photos range from $50 to $200 and up — the benefits are:

• Awesome photos, with extremely high-resolution settings
• Fantastic selection
• Rich websites/features — seemed really easy to use

That said, as a startup, these costs immediately didn’t work for us — if we were doing an advertising campaign where we were looking for a single, great photo, it seems to make more sense — but, for a site that needs 1,000’s of photos, we’d quickly be out working 2nd jobs to foot the bill!

Microstock Photography

Microstock options are very similar to the premium options above, but they often offer pricing options as low as $0.80 – $1.00 per photo, or monthly subscriptions that generate even lower pricing options.

We looked at 3 different pay sites, including www.dreamstime.com, www.fotolia.com and www.istockphoto.com — the licenses look similar, but pricing varied a bit:

• dreamstime – $0.83/image ($830 for 1,000 images)
• fotolia – $1/image ($1,000)
• istockphoto – $1/image if purchase at least 600

We also found some ’subscription’ sites:

a) www.photos.com for $99 we’d be able to download 250 photos per day — results seemed pretty good.

b) www.shutterstock.com for $199 we’d be able to download 25 photos per day (too few)… but they have 10x selection of photos.com

Since it looked like the primary benefits were lower price, we wanted to check about potential drawbacks, primarily around selection.

To do that, we did some test searches, and here are some sample results:

“Test prep”

• istock – 1,285 matches. And, we really liked their search refinements (e.g. “Did you mean test as in: a) exam, b) medical exam, c) scientific test”)
• dream time – 71 pretty good results
• fotolia – 655, photos seemed more natural
• shutterstock – 1662 results – good… also seemed more “natural” ..
• photos.com – 2580 results – good. Less “natural”

“Finance”

• istock – 787 results. ok… more posed pics
• Dreamstime – 245 results – Ok… less good photos – lots of graphics
• fotolia – lots of photos… quality not as good.
• shutterstock – 260 results. good.
• photos.com – 5,335, ok photos… less ‘natural”

At the end of these tests, we determined that we’d be most likely to use iStockPhoto (and hence, that’s probably why they’re the 800-pound gorilla in this space), because of their selection, featureset and pricing. However, there was another option that we wanted to consider a little more deeply… (read on, gentle reader )

Creative Commons-Licensed Photography

The last several years have seen an explosion in the amount of user generated content available on the web — to help accommodate the interests of users who want to share their work with others, and at the same time clarify the terms under which they’re willing to have their creative works used, Creative Commons (a nonprofit) has emerged. Creative Commons defines a set of licenses ranging from “By:” to “No Commercial Use” — you can see a good summary of the different options on Flickr.

In the end, we felt like the Flickr “CC: By:” license fit our TeachStreet Core Philosophy best of all — it’s our intention to make our data accessible by other developers (via a TeachStreet API), and so we’d like to embrace that same karma right out of the gate. This benefits our users (with fun, engaging, high quality photo content) while at the same time garnering some extra exposure for the fantastic photographers contributing to Flickr!

We know that there are other issues, including ‘Model Rights’ — but we’ve done some research on that, and feel like we’re doing our best to comply — We’ve found some documentation that it’s the photographer’s liability in releasing the photo online under the attribution license. There is a recent case of this against Virgin Mobile using a photo of a teenager in their national add campaign:

http://www.digitalartsonline.co.uk/news/index.cfm?NewsID=9109

And, of course, we’ll not only be providing linkback/attribution to the photographer’s page on Flickr, but if we receive a complaint, we would immediately take the photo down.

So, that’s our decision — and we’re sticking to it (until we change it ).

We don’t get a ton of comments on this blog, but my hunch is that we’ll get a few on this one!

We can’t wait to share some of our favorite launch photos — here’s a few to whet your appetite!

Surfing:

Photo: Creative Commons – mikebaird

Boxing:

Photo: Creative Commons – ganessas
Archery:

Photo: Creative Commons – chailey