Chris Barton, managing director of Photographers Direct has written a humorous article on the multiple use of microstock images that shows five young people—three women and two men—promoting the products and services of a dozen different companies, with copy that would lead the reader to believe that these people were employees of all these companies. Every rights-managed photographer will enjoy this piece.
An interesting thing not mentioned in Barton’s article is that the photo is exclusively represented by iStockphoto and was taken by Lise Gagne, who first became an iStock photographer in April 2003 and has 6,984 images on the site. In her career with iStock, Gagne’s photos have been licensed more than 970,000 times, and she will easily top the million mark later this year. She is iStock’s number one seller, although because she has cut back on her production in the last few years, three other photographers represented by iStock licensed rights to more images in 2009 than she did.
The image in question was first posted on iStock on December 4, 2007 and in a little over two years, it has been licensed more than 6,500 times. Nevertheless, if you do a search for “business,” “woman” and “man” and sort by the number of downloads, Gagne’s is only the 8th most popular image. The most popular has been downloaded more than 8,800 times.
Barton argues: “Designers who use microstock images and do this to their clients are letting them down.” But it may not be all the doing of the designers. I know many designers who have tried to convince their client to use more unique images, but the client says: “I don’t care if other people have used the same image, just give me the cheapest thing you can find that looks good.” Photographers may pray for a change of attitude among the end clients, but realistically it seems unlikely.