A tall tale of royalty-free imagery
Many people that do any sort of work in online media or design are familiar with the unique number of colors available in the Truecolor spectrum, standard for most common computer monitors. That number is 224, a number which is the result of using the three channel RGB system, with 8 bits for each channel. It’s a truly impressive number. Now imagine that instead of each of those unique colors there’s a high quality picture that you can choose from. That’s a lot of pictures and if you were to print them off on standard printer paper you’d get a stack that’s just a bit more than a mile high. Not that there’s any reason to do it, but still, that’s a lot of paper and if you were to stand at the base you would not be able to see the top.
Depositphotos is a stock photo, vectors and illustrations agency that seems determined to hit that number of files. They’re currently about 1 million short but given that they ended their first years since going into business at 11 million, they’ll get there well before the summer is over. If they were to print out their current files, the stack would be 1307 meters tall which is over 1500 feet taller than the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world that towers over Dubai with its 2717 feet.
This extremely diverse offer comes tailored to any customer’s needs by offering several sizes for each photo available for download and this is what the prices are based on for the credits plan. There are three options for purchasing the photos, two subscriptions and the credits one mentioned above. The subscriptions are on a daily or on a monthly basis, allowing the download of a certain number of photos/day or /month or you can purchase credits to buy the photos. The more credits you buy, the cheaper they get.
One can easily get distracted while browsing through the content available and if the search uses broader terms you can end up checking out design templates when you actually needed something else but it’s all good, you never know when that template might actually come in handy. There are always some projects on the back burner that could use a boost in style and the PSD might actually be a better fit than you could have imagined finding.
All of that being said, if there’s one thing that would stand out about this depository it would actually be two: their rate of growth and the quality, which is impressive regardless of the size chosen. And speaking of size, while keeping in mind what it would mean to the forests, it’d be interesting to see the stack of photos printed out.
