Depositphotos – A Great Place to Buy Stock & Royalty Free Images For Your Business

Whether you are a business, a blogger, a designer or a publisher, we all at some point of time need high quality royalty free stock images. Imagine a travel guide book with no photos of the destination or a food blog with no photos of delicious food items.

This is where Depositphotos can help you out. Founded in 2009, Depositphotos has quickly become one of the leading microstock agencies online. They offer users the ability to buy and sell high-quality stock photos, vector images, and videos too.

Here’s what we love about them:

1. Huge collection of Photos

There are more than 15 million images and videos to choose from. These come from more than 250,000 photographers who are uploading more than 100,000 files on a weekly basis.

2. It is very simple to use

We loved the user experience on the website. The moment you visit the site, you can see for yourself that it is very easy to use and navigate. The interface is quite similar to other players in this business.

3. Lots of pricing plans to choose from

Depositphotos has a lot of pricing options and you can easily choose the subscriptions that fit your needs. Initially, it might seem a little overwhelming, but I feel it is great that they provide so many options to choose from so that you can maximise the advantage of your budget.  Also, there is a simple pay-as-you-go option in case you feel other plans are too overwhelming.

Everyone who has ever worked in design know that they quality of a photo is very important, there is nothing worse than creating the most inspirational website only to have it ruined by pixelated images.

While the quality of the photos on Depositphotos are of a very high quality, their selection is much smaller than their competitors such as Shutterstock with more than 20 Million files or 123RF with more than 17.5 Million files.

Image Searching Tools

Depositphotos has developed a decent search engine for their stock photo database that is easy to use. The search process is based on categories first and keywords second with a simplified advanced search option.

Some things to keep in mind

• Categories are their first search preference with an extensive list of categories and subcategories
• There are exclusion filters in the advanced search option

The advanced search option provides you a lot of different filters to choose from. I think this features helps a lot if you know what you are looking for and will save you a lot of time while browsing through millions of images.

Licensing Options

Depositphotos has royalty free licensing options including extended licenses.  Extended licenses are individually priced for use.  Their extended license categories are: Multiseat, unlimited reproduction, items for resale, electronic items for resale.  Prices range from $20.oo USD to $60.00 USD and depend on the end use of the image.

Licenses can only be purchased with credits so there are not no discounts on bulk purchases but the prices are fair.

What’s Different About Them?

• Payment by SMS – buyers in certain countries can pay for photos through their mobile phone bill, replacing credits with SMS messages. This is an original innovation.
• Free Trial Subscription – buyers get a 7-day subscription for 5 photos per day free of charge, yet contributors still get paid for the sales.
• Credits actually cost $1 – most other agencies have complicated the pricing and pushed them up over time. However, at Depositphotos, 1 credit actually costs $1, and 50 credits costs $50. Discounts are available above 100 credits.
• Exclusivity is full ‘photography’ exclusivity, not just for Royalty Free licenses or image exclusivity.

Contributor Incentives

Depositphotos is currently paying 30 cents per accepted file for the first 499 of new contributors. This number has increased over the years from 10 cents to the current 30 cents.

There is an option to become an Exclusive Contributor too which means you can only contribute to Depositphotos. This assures a slightly better pay.

The contributor payments increase as you make more sales and the highest paid to non-exclusive contributors is 35 cents per image.

Our Verdict

It is cheap, that’s for sure. They have grown quite a bit in the last four years.  They are trying to appeal to the mass market by selling images for little and gaining through bulk purchases and high membership enrollment rates.

As a stock photo agency they are good, provide comprehensive information and work with their buyers and contributors to enhance their site.

To sum it all up, Depositphotos offers a pretty good service for a competitive price. Their photos, vectors and videos are of a high quality. Whether you are in need of a photo or wanting to submit your work to a stock photo agency then you should really consider Depositphotos as one of your choices.