No secret, visual content plays a crucial role in design.
Images are percieved faster than words, they are effective in setting the needed mood and sending a message.
Most people aren’t ready to read much, especially visiting a website for the first time.
All those factors make designers, bloggers, and marketers look for the sources of high-quality photos for their projects. It may seem easy now with a variety of photo stock services. But is that really so?
Let’s check what are the current problems on getting photo content for your projects and some ideas how to solve them.
Current Issues of Photostocks
There’s no shortage of stock photography websites, but most of them share the same problems.
Much of the stock photography is low-quality. Of Shutterstock’s 60 millions of photos, most are either low-quality or outfashioned. Picking the good ones is hard and time-consuming.
High-quality photos may be really expensive. When a well-curated website like Stocksy appears, it charges $75 per photo. That may be honest for the quality, but unaffordable for the majority of the target audience.
Free photos may be limited in themes and plots. On the cheap end, there’re Unsplash, Pexels, and Pixabay. However, most of the images there — being impressive and cool! —present holiday and nature shots as well as some shots from professional shootings on special occasions like weddings or birthdays. So, for some themes, you will find a diversity of shots while the others won’t get you any.
Many photos on free stock services are amateur as pro photo session is costy. Free photostocks certainly can’t cover a $5000 bill to organize a proper photo session with the Profoto light, professional models, photographer, director, make-up artist, stylist, clothing, and post-production. That’s why it’s not that easy to find professional shots you may need for your design project or business presentation. And when you do find them, the chances are high you will find them on many other websites and blogs: the choices for those who need this business-like or specific stuff are quite limited.
Photos from stocks may not look harmonically together. If you are seeking for a bunch of images to be applied in one interface, blog or presentation, it is another challenge to make them look consistent together. Being shot by different photographers, they may show different style and approaches to composition. Thus, you’ll have to take effort to look up for the ones that match each other. That’s possible but time-consuming — and time is money!
So, there’s a market gap for cheap photography with expensive production. Is that possible to get high-quality photos for free?
Solution: Professional Photo Stock Service
Being a team of designers and developers here at Icons8, we went through all the pains described above. Communication with designers and bloggers from different corners of the world has shown that we are by far not alone. So, when we haven’t found a solution, we decided to make it by ourselves: the first step to our free stock photography service Moose was made.
Basically, Moose is is a constantly growing collection of stock photos made under professional production.
- All the images are free for a link.
- Photos are made by a movie-scale team: directors, photographers, stylists, makeup artists, prop designers, an architect, a 3D modeler, a post-production team, and two collage artists.
- Photos present the variety of themes, clean stylish performance.
- AI and web-developers combine the images with various backgrounds and 3D-rendered scenes. It makes the collection more flexible for users’ needs and goals.
- All the pictures match each other and can effectively work together.
- You can also order a photo you need.
What can you get from Moose?
Going deeper, as a Moose user, you may:
- download any photo for free and use it for your personal or commercial project with a link to Moose
- match the photos with each other, both as a collection of images for one project or as a new image compiled from several photos
- select the image you need from the wide variety of themes, settings and models
- order a photo you need in case you haven’t found any which will satisfy your needs
- use photos as title images for online publications effectively combining them with headings or other copy needed
What makes Moose different?
1) Professional production
Most photo stocks, especially free ones, present the huge curated collections of pictures taken by photographers and contributed to the platform. It means that they may be totally different in style and performance.
In some cases it’s gain while in the others it’s pain, especially if you have to stick to one particular style in your visual content strategy. The big distinguishing feature of Moose is that all the photos are not contributed by a random variety of photographers who may have a different level of skills: the images are made by pro photographers, in specially prepared settings.
2) Respond to the market needs
Another benefit is the market research which the creative team makes to provide users with the photos they really need. It also helps to plan the new directions and themes which are on demand but aren’t broadly presented in the current photo stocks.
3) The ability of photos to match each other
Although the pictures cover the diversity of thematic categories, they are all done in a clean kinfolk-style manner so that they could be combined if required. You may use background from one image, a model from the other and an object from the third — and they will successfully give an outcome of another stylish image. Moreover, you may find a lot of read-made combinations, like the examples below.
Here are some of the examples of our composed images.
It means that with Moose you can plan a long-term content strategy for your blog, set of landing pages or social networks being sure that you have a constantly growing collection of sophisticated photos consistent in style and made under professional production with post-production processing.
4) The chance to ask for a photo you need
It’s hard — let’s be honest, impossible — to find another free photo stock with high-quality images which will allow for ordering the photo. Moose is the one that offers it showing a brand new approach to stock photography.
In short, we are inviting you to participate helping us with your ideas. Cryptocurrencies, artificial intelligence, healthy lifestyle, sarcasm toward anything of the above — tell us your needs!
The project got a cool discussion and great support from the community on Product Hunt.
So we decided to continue it here with Medium readers. Guys, let us know what you think — your feedback is the best way to improve the product!
