5 Ways to Use Royalty-Free Stock Photos For Your Design and Marketing Tasks

One picture can share your brand value and features. Enterprises spend thousands on making outstanding HD photos to improve customer retention and sales. But what should start-ups or small businesses do when there are no resources for shooting their products?

Stock content marketplaces offer royalty-free thematic pictures that can suit your commercial or personal projects. With a platform like https://depositphotos.com/, you can get eye-catching visuals without spending your time and money on finding a photographer. Read on to discover royalty-free stock photos and how they can benefit your projects.

What are stock photos?

Stock photography is usually high-quality thematic pictures that professional and amateur creators sell on specialized platforms, so-called stock photo marketplaces. Stock photos aren’t specifically made for a single client. On the contrary, they’re distributed to multiple customers under usage rights. This way, a company can simply buy photos online for commercial usage.

Stock content marketplaces offer different licensing conditions. For example, you can get a photo under the editorial license, which means you can only use it for illustrative print and digital material, but not for marketing campaigns or other commercial purposes.

Royalty-free licensed material is in great demand among companies, as they can use once purchased images unlimited times and for multiple projects. Contributors may distribute pictures under a royalty-free license to several clients in a single marketplace. Nonetheless, all royalty-free files belong to the creators under the copyright agreement. 

Is it possible to use free stock photos for commercial purposes?

Stock content marketplaces offer free photos to use in personal and commercial projects. Nonetheless, their usage can be restricted by additional requirements that may differ depending on the platform. In most cases, you have to attribute the author or source of the downloaded image, so the option can be unsuitable for commercial projects that strive for uniqueness.

Consider buying a subscription or a specific extended license for unrestricted stock photo usage. Stock content platforms offer various pricing plans, some with a fixed number of available downloads, depending on particular source conditions.

Where to use royalty-free stock photos

Top-quality photo stocks feature millions of thematic royalty-free images, so you can easily find visuals for your commercial projects. Design and marketing agencies appreciate the unlimited reusability of stock photos and even purchase entire picture collections to implement them in ongoing and further projects. Learn how and where you can use royalty-free stock images below.

1. Web design projects

Before starting to work on a project, designers devise several prototypes and mock-ups for presenting their ideas to clients. This way, companies can choose the most suitable website or application visuals. Some designers provide minimalistic prototypes without pictures, icons, and text, so their clients don’t understand what the projects will look like in the end. To clarify your vision and improve your chances of involvement in the design, use stock photos in the prototyping stage.

When working with small businesses, designers can also face situations where clients don’t provide them with any photos to use in a project. Using stock images may be a fair solution in this case. When the company starts to profit from its business, it makes sense to request unique content for the promotion.

2. eCommerce product descriptions

Online stores often lack high-quality product pictures, as manufacturers frequently don’t provide them, or their photos simply look unappealing. Start-up businesses should consider using stock photos for their websites, so they don’t have to worry about finding a photographer, and can just focus on their core activities of attracting customers and generating profit. They can add images to product cards and visually portray their goods’ features and usage methods.

3. Commercial presentations

During a presentation, pictures always attract the audience’s attention. Therefore, to pitch your ideas and brighten your commercial presentation, you should opt for stock images. You don’t have to use paid files, as many stock content marketplaces offer special collections where you’ll find free visuals for highlighting your plans.

4. Advertising campaigns on social networks

Facebook and Instagram users rapidly scroll through ads, and there are just a few seconds to catch their attention. You should carefully consider your advertising visuals to successfully conduct marketing campaigns on social media. In creative content, well-designed color palettes, compositions, storylines, and emotional narratives affect the conversion rate.

Stock image platforms allow browsing their libraries using advanced filters so that you can sort images by color and point of view, or select the scene origin and location. With these options, you can simplify your search for relevant advertising content and enhance your ads.

5. Blog post illustrations

Companies employ content marketing strategies to improve customer retention rates and attract new clients to their products or services. A blog post with long-read text is not enough to convince users to stay on a site. Therefore, you should consider using pictures in your articles for structuring information and visualizing narrative ideas. Stock content marketplaces can provide you with images on different topics to boost your content marketing strategy.

What is the best stock photo site?

Depositphotos is one of the largest stock content platforms, providing users with 230+ million royalty-free images, videos, and audio files. The library features thematic photo collections and advanced search filters, so you can look for visuals that perfectly suit your personal and commercial projects. You can sort files by type, date, orientation, contributor, color, origin, and location. Or, try the Search by Image tool to find similar, licensed pictures if you already have an appropriate photo.

To download royalty-free stock photos from Depositphotos, purchase a budget-friendly subscription or on-demand plan. The platform offers favorable conditions for individuals and enterprises.

Conclusion

When launching a business, you don’t always have time and financial resources for arranging photoshoots and finding unique pictures. The solution is stock photo marketplaces that allow you to buy royalty-free photos once, and use them multiple times for various marketing and design projects. The Depositphotos stock content library offers flexible pricing plans and free files so you can choose the best visuals needed.