The Impact of Microstock Photography

How a crowdsourced business changes the world of profesional photographers and designers

Daniella Zalcman interviews NYTimes.com Design Director Khoi Vinh on May 22, 2007.

Khoi Vinh may not be a photographer, but he is intimately acquainted with the world of stock photography as both a graphic designer and as the design director at NYTimes.com. Here’s what he had to say about the industry and how the rise of microstock has affected the design world.

Daniella Zalcman: As a graphic designer, how much do you rely on stock photography? How important is good stock to your work?

Khoi Vinh: In general, we rely on stock photography more for online design when we’re creating new brands. When we’re trying to develop a Web site for a startup and they have no identity, there’s a stage where they need a logo and a visual language, and we look through stock photography to help them round out their vocabulary and how they express themselves though photos. And we might use photography to dress up various sections of the site and so forth.

Q: How have microstock houses affected how designers work and how they use photography?

A: I think it’s really terrific because one view of traditional graphic design is that it’s a craft that juxtaposes craft and imagery. When the personal computer revolution came around, access to type became much more liberal. You had tremendously improved access to a number of different typefaces, and access to images lagged behind. Then, in the '90s, there was this new access in the marketplace to royalty-free images, and that helped designers immensely.

Since then, microstock has really accelerated that access and made it much easer to use high-resolution images without having to jump through hoops as designers had done before. It’s now a much more immediate process.

Q: There's an ongoing debate about whether the words “professional” and “amateur” are really applicable anymore when the quality of images on microstock sites is slowly rising to meet that of Getty and Corbis libraries. How does this translate into the design world? What’s the difference between a designer who uses an image from Veer, let’s say, and one who uses photos from a microstock house?

A: It’s sort of like an economic stratification. The big ad agencies and the big design studios that are working for high-dollar clients are still going to turn to the big stock agencies like Veer and Getty for truly top-shelf stock photography images. And for now, that’s going to set them apart.

With microstock, it’s much more a conversation between the photographers and designers in the audience. In microstock it’s much easier to find out what images are really mapping to the needs of designers because the barrier to using those photographer’s images are much lower.

It’s a different kind of marketplace; they can adapt much more quickly. You’ll see, over time, microstock get much more sophisticated and varied, and there’s going to be a stylistic difference between microstock and big stock houses. It’s an entirely different economic gain, so it makes for different creative gain as well.

Q: Why do you think microstock sites have been so successful in employing the principles of crowdsourcing?

A: I think largely because of the proliferation of affordable digital cameras. More and more people are calling themselves photographers and getting interested in photography than ever before. I think photography used to be a trade that was very expensive to jump into; now it’s a trade that’s relatively inexpensive, so everyone’s doing it.

There are so many images being generated all around that this new breed of photographers is looking for a new market and looking for ways to turn these photos into a market.

Q: Do you really think there's wisdom in crowds?

A: I think it’s generally a positive and valuable thing. It gets more people into the mix. A lot of what online media is about is in engaging in conversation and exchanging ideas, and croudsourcing adds a valuable dimension to that.

Q: What will the next phase of crowdsourcing look like? Have we hit its true potential?

A: I don’t think I can venture a guess as to what it’s going to look like, but I think we’re only starting to realize its dimensions. It’s too early to call it a well-understood phenomenon.

(Edited by Kathy Kattenburg)