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Image Pro Tip #1532 – Stock Photography

Allow me to save you the time and pain I just inflicted on myself while using stock photography from commercial photo sites. I’ve spent the last couple weeks working on the pivoted version of the landing page for a product I’m working on. I dedicated a Friday afternoon a few weeks back finding and collecting images from several stock photography sites that had the right look/feel for the messaging I was shooting for.  I stashed my picks of images in the respective lightbox/shopping carts/etc on each site (while logged in), downloaded the full size watermarked versions to do layout with, and moved on to other things. My intent was to go back and either use my carts or lightboxes (depending on which provider) to purchase the full size images before going live.

What should have been quick, easy, and painless this morning was anything but that. When I logged into the provider that had the images I wanted to buy, the lightboxes I had added were there in name but otherwise empty. I spent a chunk of my morning trying to find the right combination of keywords I had used the first time to find my images again. I ultimately wound up paging through 49 200 image deep pages of stock photography before I found the images.

So this posts serves as a reminder to myself to capture that data. I’ll be saving the working images as something like vendor_description_item_ID.jpg or barring IDs like that something that will let me find the image again such as vendor_keyword_keyword_keyword…_description.jpg. The alternative would be to simply have written down that information on paper somewhere, but while I generally like writing things, you can’t grep paper.

Karl