Why Are There No Stock Photo Sites for Print Companies?
Have you run into this yourself?
You went looking for good images of printed products that could be used for your website or social media posts only to find that they don’t exist on the stock photo sites or what you do find doesn’t work. That’s what happened to us and everyone we spoke with!
For years sites like Getty Images, iStock Photo and Adobe Stock have created huge galleries of images covering tens of thousands of different situations, seasons, elements, people, animals, locations and many many more categories.
Occasionally we’d find the image of someone near printing equipment or some blank illustrations, but never anything good for print companies.
Why Is This?
Based on our research we found that there is one primary reason you can’t find good print industry related images on stock photo sites.
The industry, products and services are just too narrow for these sites.
What you find is that they choose to add images that are universal enough that they could be used by most industries for a number of situations. This is an abstract yet efficient way of building their library quickly to provide greater volume that can serve the majority of people.
“It doesn’t make sense for them to have images of feather flags or tri-fold brochures because of how specific those items are and the context they need to be used in.”
What Can You Do About It?
Our first and most obvious recommendation is to take pictures of the work that you’re printing and use it online for yourself! But we get that many printers don’t want to expose who their customers are by doing this and in most cases it’s still very time consuming to take a good photo and put it into use on your website, social posts, emails or blogs.
We totally get it!
This is why we put together a stock photo library for print companies that you cannot find anywhere else. This library has thousands of images categorized by product, service and industry so you can easily promote your print company without hassle or high costs.