Stock Photography FAQ

What benefits are there in dealing with Digital Stock?

There are actually many advantages to distributing images in digital form:

• Digital images are easy and cheap to mass duplicate, and the duplicates can not be distinguished from the originals.  This has made it easy to distribute photographic images cheaply and quickly.  There is less risk in the likelihood of loss or damage to transparencies since photography sellers will rarely be required to let the original film-based transparencies out of their possession (Pickerell and Child, 1994).

• Today, "85% of the art directors with advertising agencies and graphic design firms in the United States are currently using Macintosh computers for layout purposes to create comps they show clients." (Pickerell and Child, 1994).  This leaves the digital medium readily available for use in most design applications.

• As cumbersome as image retrieval might seem through the use of keywords, it is actually easier and quicker to narrow down image selection through word searches than by paging through catalogs.  New markets for stock photography are always opening up, and cheaply distributed digital imagery is suitable to fill these needs even if the prices are smaller.  Multimedia is one of the latest such markets (Greengard, 1993).

• Images can now be delivered instantly — virtually anywhere worldwide with access to the World Wide Web.