Yet again, I’m late to the ball. It seems iStockphoto.com has been building a royalty-free stock image (and sound and code and illustration…) bank. Normally that wouldn’t be news. Normally, I’d be lumping them in with all the rest of the bastards who prey on poor, unaware photographers, paying a ludicrously low fee to license (or, worse, buy) their photographs and then sell them over and over and over without cutting the creator in on the cabbage.

But I’m rambling. Royalty-free stock takes advantage of the photographer. It’s an old story.

iStockphoto.com breaks that standard. They don’t pay you for uploading your stuff, but they will pay you when someone downloads it. The system is totally micropaments in action: 25 cents per download. The originator gets a nickel. You’re not going to get rich doing this, but that’s not the point. The designer in me sees a catalog of images available immediately for practically no money — a considerable improvement over the $5 to $30 I’d pay a regular stock house. Pay a quarter, d-load the image, use it.

The downside of it is that this is a community fed system, so there’s not much fltering for quality. Some of the stuff is kinda cheesy. But there’s a lot of nice images in there, you just gotta sift through some dreck to find ‘em.