Here's one of the 350,000 free stock images available on PhotoXpress.
Fotolia, one of the most popular micropayment stock imagery sites, is launching a new brand Thursday called PhotoXpress, which offers a library of almost 350,000 images at no charge.
Fotolia hopes to use free images to reel in first-time customers and familiarize them with the process of legally licensing photos. Users who download the free images will have to register their names and e-mail address. Potential customers include bloggers and designers.
“There’s a lot of people out there where even $1 is too much for images,” says Patrick Lor, Fotolia’s newly hired president for North America, who oversees PhotoXpress.
Lor says contributors will be paid when their images are downloaded from the new service, but wouldn’t say how much, noting that it varies depending on the source of the images. For now, most of the photographs are files that Fotolia members have agreed to opt-in to the service, Lor says. Fotolia plans to add more images from other collections.
While many of the images in the free collection are likely to be images that simply aren’t selling well on Fotolia, Lor says some photographers may try uploading popular work as a way to get their names out. “It’s really an exercise in seeing what works and what doesn’t,” Lor says.
PhotoXpress will limit registered users to ten downloads per day.
The average price of stock image licenses has fallen drastically in the last few years. At one large stock agency, Alamy, the average price of a royalty-free image is down 21 percent in the last year.
Online competition is driving prices down. Images similar to those that once sold for hundreds of dollars are now available for a few bucks on micropayment sites. Making matters worse for photographers and stock agencies, amateur Web publishers commonly copy images they find on Google Images or Flickr—often without without permission.
Fotolia isn’t the first agency to offer free images, but the adoption of this model by such a big player is a sign that the free strategy may be spreading.
Stock.Xchange also advertises a library of 350,000 free images. That site, which is connected to the micropayment site StockXpert, is now part of Getty Images’s JupiterImages division. Getty also owns Fotolia competitor iStockphoto.com.
Fotolia already offers a small selection of free samples, as does competitor Dreamstime.
PhotoXpress is incorporated in Hartford, Connecticut, though Fotolia does not have an office there and most Fotolia employees work from home for from small offices. Lor, a former iStockphoto executive, is based in Calgary, Alberta.
