Tired of Stock Photos? I have the solution!

If you’re a blogger you know how important is to have a good looking website. That is done most of the times  by choosing the right image to go with your articles. But using stock images will just make everything look boring and will not attract the right audience or it might have your website look like 100 others.

A new company called Lobster came up with a clever solution to help both the content writers and photographers alike. Using images without giving credit can easily get you in trouble if you don’t know the copyright laws plus the creators seem to always be loosing.

Andy Shield, Head of Content & PR talks about the company:

”Lobster is on a mission to put an end to the ever-increasing issue of illegal downloads from social media. The three founders, Olga, Maria and Andrey, discovered that photographers, of all skill levels, were having their images (and videos) used without their consent. There were a number of reasons for this including the fact that stock photography just isn’t cutting it anymore. The public are desensitised to generic images of “same old, same old” smiling families and cliched business meetings.”

So apart from the fact that photographers can get good use of their filled up external drives  with photos,  other people can use them to create even more engaging content.

”The Lobster platform allows anyone to make their social media images (and photo archives, like Dropbox) available to licence. 75% of every licence fee then goes directly to the photographer and the service is used widely by ad agencies, the press and publishers. The really clever bit is the Artificial Intelligence which tries to calculate the contents of each image and then tag it appropriately (because most humans don’t label things). The AI learns from every image added, so it’s getting brighter every day. Currently there are over 5 million images available to licence and billions more available on request.” (Andy Shield)

Had a look on the website and you can find pretty much everything you can think of in terms of image content and all of them are really high quality and creative looking.  Also the fact that photographers can benefit for it is a plus since we all know how hard can it be to sell your photographs if you’re not a specific type of photographer ( wedding,events etc).

If you’re a photographer the only thing you need to do is go to the website, sign up by connecting the account where you usually publish your work. Lay back while the content auto-syncs (no upload is needed) and you get paid. How easy is that?

The other great thing about it, is that you can also find videos on the website that will definitely make every blog more entertaining  plus if you like filming you can upload those ones as well.

What do you guys think? Would you sing up or use this service? Leave me a comment below.