The royalty-free stock image business is tough these days, and it’s nothing like it used to be. Competition between photographers is more fierce than ever, and the agencies themselves have evolved from being to small mom-and-pop websites to being huge publicly traded companies. As a long-time contributor to many of the major stock photo agencies back in the day, I’m actually pretty bummed to see a once-great business model overrun by greed.
There are only a small number of stock photo agencies that get my business these days (as a buyer), and one of my favorites is stockfresh.com. Founded by Peter Hamza, this site was started from the ground up to be a friendly alternative to the many traditional behemoths in the stock image game. They are very design-centric and care greatly about the content they sell, and the entire team is friendly and supportive to it’s contributors – which is an unfortunate rare thing these days. Because of that, I spend a lot of money with them to buy the royalty-free photos and Illustrations I need for my projects.
Stockfresh.com home page screenshot
If you’ve checked out my Resources page, you’ll see that I have a short paragraph on stockfresh.com along with their logo to the left of it. I had to create that logo from scratch due to the fact that there wasn’t anything on the web that was good enough to use, and to be quite frank, I have no idea what to do with it now other than to upload it here in case someone else needs it. It’s not like it’s an especially difficult logo to recreate, but there’s no point in recreating something if it already exists, right?
Anyway, here’s hoping that Stockfresh will be around for a long time to come. After all, I don’t particularly like giving big greedy companies my hard earned cash, and as I’m totally comfortable supporting their business as long as they stay true to their appreciation of their contributors.
Download the vector source file
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