You Ask, I Answer: Affordable Stock Footage and Photos?

In today's episode, Leah asks, what do you recommend for an affordable stock photos or stock footage site? So stock photos and stock footage are a tricky area. There are a lot of companies out there that are selling a lot of stuff. But we have to remember that the whole purpose of stock photos is well is twofold. One, it is to get imagery or video that we would not otherwise be able to get.

And two, is to get it in a licensed manner so that uh we're not violating anyone's copyright or um getting uh ourselves into legal trouble. As such, uh the challenge with affordable, and I'll put this in in quotes if you're affordable uh sites, is that because it's affordable, you don't know the providence. You don't know the lineage of the of the data that you're working with. You don't know where it came from, uh how it was generated, and whether the site that's selling it has a legal license to use it. Um there are not a ton of stock photo houses that um are cheap that shoot their own stuff.

A lot of them are aggregators and they pull data from uh all sorts of other places like Unsplash, for example. Uh and more often than not, their data pools are contaminated. By that I mean they've got imagery that is licensed to somebody else, and that uh they will get themselves in trouble if it's discovered, but more importantly, you will get in trouble if uh it is discovered. And by trouble, I mean slapped with enormous fines and lawsuits. When I was working uh at a uh financial services company many, many years ago, there was one image on our website that was uh reused from Getty Images, which is a very well known images clearinghouse and uh definitely one of the most uh well known and one of the most expensive.

And a single 300 by 250 picture uh earned the company a f a whopping uh lawsuit of uh sixty thousand dollars for violating their copyright. And where did that come from? Came from one of the the inexpensive stock photo sites on the on the web. And so that was a uh a very eye-opening lesson that you don't mess around with uh any of these licensing companies. Their job literally is to just sue people all day long.

Uh they collect users from they collect money from users. Uh they pay a very small portion of it to the actual photographers, um, and mostly they just sue people. Uh and you do not want to be on that list because as you can tell, it gets really expensive really fast. Um so what's the solution? How do you know that you're getting licensed appropriately stock photos and stock footage?

The answer is this. Your phone. As long as your phone's got a decent camera, you should be generating your own stock photography. You should be generating your own uh library of photos and images that you can use that you have a legal right to use that are are yours, and that at no point anyone can contest uh the ownership with because it's literally yours and and you know uh where you got it from. Bonus, you can actually register your images with some of these stock photography licenses, uh licensing companies, and then have them sue other people if they use your stuff.

Uh, I would not recommend that as a revenue stream, it's fairly um uh uh it it it doesn't happen all that often, which is good for content creators. Um it's not predictable. But in all seriousness, you have video cameras and and decent uh regular cameras in your pocket, right? Most people have phones that now have uh a five megapixel or better camera in them. The newest, like iPhones, I think, and and Androids have like 14 megapixel photos, which is uh resolution that is large enough for a billboard, right?

Um most stock of photography, particularly used on the web, doesn't need to be much more than two megapixel, right? Uh that is uh literally about uh you know uh 720p video. Um for videos, you know, 720p is a is the s uh the current standard for a lot of stuff, um 1080p or HD is ideal. Uh and again, that's what these devices can do really, really well. And you can get dedicated devices like this one is um the DJI Osmo.

And if you're doing video stock footage, uh I would recommend this uh device because it has motion stabilization built in. But fundamentally, you have the technology to create your own stock photos, stock video. And if you need the things that most uh most marketers need, you have a random conference room full of people. Uh you shouldn't be doing that anyway in in the middle of a pandemic. Um but you can certainly uh take a series of photos and composite them together if you if you need if you need that look.

Um and if you can need uh you know pictures of frying pans or other random things around the house. You can certainly do that and have other people within your company also generate the same photos and then stick them all into a place like Google Photos uh as a pr on a private account, and that has a s that Google Photos has one of the best photo search engines available. It does image recognition on all the pictures you upload to it, and then you can search them, like you know, conference room, frying pan, money, um, you know, beer, whatever the the the theme of all the photos is. That way, for marketing purposes, when you need a stock photo of something, you just go and and and search in your own repository, find the photo you're looking for and you and you're off and running. Um that's the best way to achieve photos that A are distinctive because you won't find them anywhere else, and B, that are you have 100% guaranteed legal license for um and C, it's it's really affordable because it's just you and your time generating the stock photography.

Now there is a smaller learning curve with learning how to take usable stock photography, right? You're not gonna be a uh uh professional award-winning photographer uh overnight with with uh your phone and things, but you also don't have to be. If you've you know looking for uh picture of like a credit card or something, uh you can put a sheet over of any flat surface, put your credit card down, take a photo of it, they don't blur out the number, obviously. Um but putting together your stock of photography for common themes is pretty straightforward. Um you would be amazed at the amount of stuff that you or a friend or a colleague have laying around your homes that makes for interesting photos.

You just have to to get in the habit of taking them. Likewise, if your company has some kind of theme, uh as you're out and about in daily life, be on the lookout for it. Um if you are an employee of a company, you may want to uh have a ch a chat with HR about uh intellectual property ownership. Uh make sure that you're not turning over photos that uh would be usable to you outside of your current position. Obviously, if you're a company like uh on Trust Insights, our our current logo is a light bulb.

So uh most of the light bulb photos I take are obviously for work. Um but anything else is is is not necessarily fair game. Um that was the case that for me at a pa at a past few companies too. But it's a great way to build up a huge library and avoid the licensing issues and keep the costs to to nearly zero. So that's what I recommend.

Instead of a site, go with one of these. If you have follow-up questions, leave them in the comments box below. Subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter. I'll talk to you soon. Take care.

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