With all the digital technology at your fingertips, why buy pictures? Well, unless you are a phenomenal and avid photographer, your own digital creations won't do the trick when you are creating powerpoint slides, flyers, graphic pieces, websites, etc. Sites like Fotolia let you buy them and use them in whatever you are creating, as long as you aren't selling the picture itself.

Fotolia was a new name to me when I was sent their information this last month. It's a picture download site with incredibly cheap rates. You can subscribe and download pictures at your whim or you can pay for credits and buy pictures individually, similar to iStockphoto where I've bought pictures before.

For example, I needed a picture of a piggybank. I was reasonably happy with the options and it looked like there were more I didn't even look through since I found what I wanted.

Because I was given a subscription for review, I was able to direct download several piggybanks and money-saving related photos that can be used for anything, which is great for my DIYFrugal site. On the other hand, if you don't want to subscribe, you can decide what size you want to buy. If you don't need a hi-resolution picture for a graphic creation and you simply want to spruce up a blogpost legally, small size photos work better for the Internet anyway and save you money per picture.

Here's a cool video that show some of their amazing images. Who needs to hire models when you have all these at your fingertips?

 

Or, incorporate it into your Power Point program:

 

You can also edit pictures in programs like Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop or edit them in more basic editors in Picasa or Picnik to get the colors and image variations you need! I enjoyed downloading a couple of fun panels with various business card options.

Here are a couple of details about Fotolia:

Fotolia is the first worldwide social marketplace for royalty free stock images, allowing individuals and professionals to legally buy and share stock images and illustrations.

Fotolia offers the largest image bank of free and affordable royalty free photos and illustrations perfect for any medium, web or print.

Photographers and designers constantly update Fotolia with thousands of new photos and illustrations each day, while photographers and designers receive commission from each photo sold and revenue from advertising on the free section.

AND,

• Fotolia offers the largest image bank of free and most affordable royalty free photos and illustrations perfect for any medium, web or print.
• So far, there are 12,278,167 images, vectors and HD videos available at Fotolia.
• There are over 2,393,660 Fotolia members around the world.
• It was started by Oleg Tscheltzoff, Patrick Chassany and Thibaud Elziere in November 2005.
• 135,718 video clips in .mov, .avi, .wmv and flv formats.

 

Here's how it works:

CREDIT SYSTEM

Credits are Fotolia's form of currency. Credits are used to buy images on the website. (Credit from $0.75)
Image prices are given in credits; the price depends on the size and use of the purchased image. Image prices are from:

SUBSCRIPTION SYSTEM

Fotolia subscriptions allow you to download between 25 and 250 images a day during the period of your subscription.
Images downloaded using the subscription system are equal to the L size (4MP). The subscriptions are offered from:

Ohh, and I just read where you can get daily free downloads from their Facebook page! See the pretty scene below. Got that today!

Oh, there's a desktop widget too so you can search from the luxury of your desktop!

Enjoy the resource!

 

{Disclosure: For this review, I received a month's subscription with the option to download several pictures per day.}