A photographer is a person who makes photographs.
Getty Images, Inc. is a British-American visual media company with headquarters in Seattle, Washington. It is a supplier of stock images, editorial photography, video and music for business and consumers, with an archive of over 200 million assets. It targets three markets—creative professionals, the media, and corporate.
Branded Entertainment Network (BEN) is a Los Angeles-based product placement, influencer marketing and licensing company. The company offers product placement, rights clearance, and personality rights management services for the entertainment industry.
Stock photography is the supply of photographs which are often licensed for specific uses. The stock photo industry, which began to gain hold in the 1920s, has established models including traditional macrostock photography, midstock photography, and microstock photography. Conventional stock agencies charge from several hundred to several thousand United States dollars per image, while microstock photography may sell for around USD 25 cents. Professional stock photographers traditionally place their images with one or more stock agencies on a contractual basis, while stock agencies may accept the high-quality photos of amateur photographers through online submission.
stock.xchng was a website providing free-to use stock photography and illustrations, its name being a reduced version of "stock exchange". The site was launched in February 2001 by Peter Hamza, and allows users to contribute, share and download high-resolution photographs and illustrations free of charge. Contributors are encouraged to submit material to enhance their photography career through wider public exposure. In 2009, the site had over 2,500,000 registered users and more than 400,000 photos. Until 2009 it operated parallel to its sister site, Stockxpert.com, until the site's parent company, Jupiterimages, was purchased by Getty Images, and the site is now tied in with the iStock library of paid images.
Masterfile Corporation is a stock photography library in Toronto, Ontario, Canada It is represented in over 100 other countries around the world by independent agents and distributors.
Pandora is an American subscription-based music streaming service owned by Sirius XM Holdings. Based in Oakland, California, the service carries a focus on recommendations based on the "Music Genome Project" — a means of classifying individual songs by musical traits. The service originally launched in the consumer market as an internet radio service, which would generate personalized channels based on these traits and songs liked by the user; this service is available in an advertising-supported tier, and a subscription-based version. In 2017, the service launched Pandora Premium, an on-demand version of the service more in line with contemporary competitors.
Microstock photography, also known as micropayment photography, is a part of the stock photography industry. What defines a company as a microstock photography company is that they (1) source their images almost exclusively via the Internet, (2) do so from a wider range of photographers than the traditional stock agencies, and (3) sell their images at a very low rate for a royalty-free (RF) image.
iStock is an online royalty free, international micro stock photography provider based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. The firm offers millions of photos, illustrations, clip art, videos and audio tracks. Artists, designers and photographers worldwide contribute their work to iStock collections in return for royalties. Nearly half a million new photos, illustrations, videos and audio files, are added each month.
Shutterstock is an global provider of stock photography, stock footage, stock music, and editing tools; it is headquartered in New York. Founded in 2003 by programmer and photographer Jon Oringer, Shutterstock maintains a library of over 350 million royalty-free stock photos, vector graphics, and illustrations, with over 21 million video clips and music tracks available for licensing. Originally a subscription site only, Shutterstock expanded beyond subscriptions into a la carte pricing in 2008. It has been publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange since 2012.
Bruce Livingstone is a Canadian entrepreneur who founded Calgary-based iStockphoto, an online distributor of stock photography.
National Geographic Image Collection, a division of the National Geographic Society (NGS) headquartered in Washington, D.C., United States, is a stock photography agency that manages and licenses one of the world's most comprehensive and unique collections of photographs and original artwork. It maintains a collection of more than 10 million digital images, transparencies, black-and-white prints, early auto chromes, and pieces of original artwork.
DreamsTime.com is an online royalty-free microstock provider based in Brentwood, Tennessee.
Yuri Arcurs, born Jacob Yuri Wackerhausen on July 27, 1979 is a Danish stock photographer and owner of PeopleImages.com. In 2007 he was the top ranked selling contributor at Shutterstock, Fotolia, Crestock and BigStockPhoto In 2008 Arcurs sold 650,000 images per year through 16 different microstock agencies
Alamy is a British privately owned stock photography agency launched in September 1999. Its headquarters are in Milton Park, near Abingdon, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom. It has a development and operations centre at Techno park in Trivandrum, Kerala, India and a sales office in Brooklyn, New York, United States.
Depositphotos is a royalty-free content marketplace with headquarters in New York, United States. The company was founded by Dmitry Sergeev in November 2009 in Kyiv, Ukraine. The Depositphotos library has over 170,000,000 files including royalty-free stock photos, vector images, video clips and editorial files. In 2012, the Depositphotos library exceeded 10 million files in less than four years and was considered one of the fastest-growing photobank in the world.
Pond5 is a New York–based online marketplace for royalty-free media. The company licenses stock footage, stock music, stock photography sound effects, after effects, images and 3-D models. Pond5 is reported to have the world's largest collection of stock footage, hosting more than 23.2 million clips as of August 2020.
Snapwire is a platform that allows users to take photos and videos in response to a request for brands, publishers, small businesses, and creatives who seek images that fulfill certain requirements that they set. Buyers post a creative image brief and photographers respond by submitting their photos through Snapwire website or mobile app. Winning photographers are awarded and paid. Aside from Requests, Snapwire regularly runs creative Challenges concerning popular image needs. Challenges are curated by Snapwire and are open to the public.
Can Stock Photo is a stock photography provider which licenses royalty-free images, photos, digital illustrations, picture clip art and footage files on behalf of photographers, illustrators, and videographers. Founded in 2004, it was one of the earliest microstock agencies.
Twenty20 is a crowd-sourced stock photography marketplace founded in 2014 by Matt Munson, Todd Emaus, and Kevin Fremon. It is headquartered in Marina Del Rey, CA, United States. Twenty20 maintains a library of over 45 million royalty-free stock photos.
