Excellence photographs are necessary for web designing attractive websites. Whether you incorporate them into your site's web design or place them in its content, your choice of photographs makes a big difference in how aesthetically pleasing your website is.

In this month's newsletter we talk about some of the most general options for sourcing photographs for your website and give details the types of licenses that stock photography libraries use.

Obtaining photographs for use on your website
Taking your own photos
Taking your own photographs to place on your website is an obvious starting point. Benefits are that it can be fairly low-cost, guarantees that your photographs are unique to your website, enables you to take photographs exactly suited to the web design of your site, and in most cases removes the need for you to pay licensing fees or have restrictions imposed on how you can use the photographs. Despite the benefits, however, taking good-quality photographs takes time, resources, skill and requires appropriate equipment. Depending on the purpose of your photograph, you might also need to organize models, scout for locations, plan for lighting conditions etc. If taking photos for profitable purposes in public places, it might be needed for you to obtain a permit.
Hiring a photographer

If you want the advantages of having your own photos on your website, but don't want the hassle of taking them yourself, hiring a photographer who can do most of the necessary work for you might be an option. However, there are higher costs involved and you might not necessarily own the copyright to the photographs that have been taken.

Using stock photography libraries
The most common source for obtaining photographs is to use stock photography libraries. There are several professional stock photography library websites on the Internet that let you search, preview and acquire photographs from many photographers. Prices will vary depending on the type of photograph, how unique it is, and the licensing conditions. As a side note, if you develop a corporate website, chances are that your company might have its own internal repository of images that you can use.

The advantages of using stock photography libraries
If you choose to source your photographs from a stock photograph library, a major advantage is that you can get photographs featuring scenes that might not be readily available to you, and any permits and model release forms will already have been acquired. You will also be able to preview and compare photographs, and in most cases, download a low-resolution version to evaluate whether it will be suitable for your requirements.

Royalty-free vs. rights-managed photograph
Stock taking photographs libraries will generally license photographs on either a royalty-free or rights-managed basis.

The term "royalty-free" does not necessarily mean that there is no cost involved. Instead, it means that once you have payed a once-off license fee for a photograph, you will be able to subsequently use it an unlimited number of times in as many of your own projects as you want. Royalty-free images are generally the cheapest.

Rights-managed photos, on the other hand, are significantly more expensive than royalty-free photos and have usage restrictions attached to them. Rights-managed photographs give the photographer/stock photography library a large degree of control over how, where, and how often the graphics are used. Exclusivity is often guaranteed as part of the licensing fee, which ensures that someone else doesn't use the same image you have licensed for a similar purpose. Exclusivity might be total, so that once you license the image it will never be used by anyone else, or exclusivity might be guaranteed within your particular industry/field or based on how you intend to use the graphic (for example, it might guarantee that the photo is not used on another website).

Licensing conditions will vary from one image library to another, so you should always check before deciding whether to acquire an image.