I am continuing my series on the use of stock photographs in presentations (see the article) with reviews of a few stock photo websites that I have the most experience with. Today I look at Dreamstime.
Let’s start with the most important (and positive) thing first. Dreamstime has the best search engine in the business. And that is a huge functional advantage. It does you no good to have 3 million photos available if you can’t find one that works for your needs.
In addition to standard keyword searching, you have a variety of advanced filtering options. Just as an example of SOME of the options available, you can select based on:
- Contributor
- Image price
- Resolution
- Aspect ratio
- Primary color
- Models (number, sex, age, race)
- Photo/illustration/vector
Search results are not always perfect, since someone has to associate the properties of each image, but it’s a great way to narrow in on an appropriate image.
Model diversity is very good on Dreamstime. Many ethnicities are represented.
The pricing model allows either a storehouse of credits that can be applied against individual downloads or subscriptions allowing multiple downloads over a period of time.
Credits expire if they are not used within one year. The lowest purchase option is 8 credits for $10 (as always, pricing specifics can and do change without notice… Check to make sure my information is still valid when you read this). You can find small, 72dpi images available for 1 credit. But getting up to a full slide size at 300dpi is more likely to cost 5-17 credits.
Subscriptions are also available. Unfortunately, they recently did away with the option that was perfect for working on a single presentation. I used to buy a one-week subscription at 10 images per day, which was just enough time at a low enough cost to fully populate one or two slide shows. Now the shortest subscription available is one month at a cost of $240. This lets you download up to 25 images a day at any resolution and size. That can be a great deal if you actually need that much volume, but any day you don’t download 25 images is wasted money. So for the average person trying to “pretty up” a slide presentation, it’s overkill and too expensive.
I recommend Dreamstime for businesses who can afford to spend a little more for the convenience of faster/better searching and who do enough photo work within a month/quarter/year to justify a subscription. For most purposes, the quality and selection is every bit as good as iStockPhoto with a lower price and better usability.
UPDATE JAN 13, 2014: I am happy to report that the service has reintroduced a short-term subscription plan that is more appropriate for single-project use. You can buy a one-week subscription allowing 5 total downloads ($39 USD) or 10 total downloads ($69 USD). Since photos can be downloaded at high resolution and large pixel size, this can save money over credits usage for high quality images.
