PicApp – Free Professional Stock Images?

Cannes: Blindness - Premiere
Image details: Cannes: Blindness – Premiere served by picapp.com

If you run a website that needs lots of stock photography, particularly pictures of celebrities, it can get very expensive. It means licensing photographs or waiting until you get a cease and desist legal threat from the owner. PicApp aims to solve this problem by making stock photographs free.

Registration is free and not actually necessary, but I would recommend you do.

What’s the catch? You don’t get a clean image, the photograph has some “stuff” along with it that actually pays for the use of the photograph. You have to decide if this is a good trade off yourself. Take a look at the example top left of this page to see what you think.

First you get the dashboard where you can search for “creative” or “editorial” pictures. Creative pictures are the “man in suit” variety, while editorial are pictures from the news, like celebrities. It’s the latter that can really hurt the old bank balance and therefore where the main interest lies.

PicApp - the best content for the best publishers

Once you have your results you can take a closer look at the images that came back
PicApp - natalie portman images

Selecting a particular image allows you to embed, in a manner a lot like Flickr or YouTube

PicApp - Image of Cannes: Blindness - Premiere

Verdict

I absolutely would NOT use this service for “creative” images. The prices at istockphoto are so low I would much prefer an image without any cruft around it. The one role I see this playing is in the celebrity field. Searching for “Natalie Portman” on stock sites either comes back with nothing or pricey. Hopefully the in-your-face aspect of the service will be worked on so the frame doesn’t detract so much from the picture, it’s early days and I know they are listening to feedback.

One element that might interest you though is in future publishers will be able to share in the proceeds. As a way to make some side money while adding some colour and interest to our pages, this could be an interesting service to watch.

Posted on May 15, 2008 by Chris Garrett 
Filed Under Content Licensing

Comments

3 Responses to “PicApp – Free Professional Stock Images?”

  1. David on May 15th, 2008 3:51 pm

    Thank you for the feedback.

    I just wanted to jump on here and let you know we have an animated frame which some people find less intrusive and distracting. It then only shows the advertisement when you mouse-over the image.

    Thanks again for the feedback. Everything is being taken in so that we can provide the best high quality image source for bloggers.

  2. Chris Garrett on May 16th, 2008 1:53 pm

    OK cool, I will have to try the animated version next time. An idea might be to allow the advertising to be a separate embed? So the pic can be in one place and the ad in another? Often I attribute pictures at the end of a post where it will not conflict with the message of the article

  3. David on May 21st, 2008 2:08 am

    Splitting up the advertising as another embed, as I am sure you can understand, would be difficult to enforce, though I understand why you asked. I will pass on the feedback to the developers to see if they could come up with a feasible way of doing it. :)

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