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[Whilst the following is a paid review, my opinions are totally honest/unbiased, and I will only ever review sites/services that I feel are useful to our audience]
NOTE: Since publishing this review it has come to my attention that some of you have had negative experiences with DepositPhotos. I want to be as honest and transparent as possible, and part of that means keeping this review up. When writing the review I hadn’t heard any negatives about DepositPhotos, and most of my review is based on their helpful interface, good range of photos etc… I encourage you to look over both my review and the comments at the bottom of this post and make your own mind up.
DepositPhotos.com
If you’ve never heard of DepositPhotos that I’m afraid to say you may have been living under a rock for the past few years. DepositPhotos have grown to become one of the largest stock photo sites in the world, and for good reason! They offer a huge library of quality photographs, along with a slick members area and top notch support.
Today we’re going to take a look at just what makes this giant of the photo world so successful. We’ll look over their expansive library of photos, as well as their special offers, browsing perks and more!
Consistent Quality
Being a designer who has to use stock photography very regularly I know just how much the quality of the photo matters. It can be near impossible to product a top-quality photo manipulation if the base photos aren’t up to scratch.
Sensual Brunette Woman in White Dress
One of my favorite things about DepositPhotos is the consistent high quality of their photos. Their extensive library covers a range of styles, from realistic to avante-garde, and whether you’re looking for a photo with a dreamy feel, or something more hard hitting, they’ve got you covered. You can tell that they have a strict acceptance policy with their photographers, as almost all of their photos are highly professional, well lit and well focused. Again, as a designer working with high res photos a lot, you notice the details!
Quality/Relevant Search Results
As I’ve already mentioned, the quality of DepositPhotos photo library is incredible. However, another key feature of their site is the quality/relevance of their search results. On many stock photo sites often you have to browse through several pages to find photos that are totally relevant to your search query. They have plenty of good photos to match your needs, but the good photos are obscured by the average/irrelevant ones.
With DepositPhotos I almost always find exactly the right photo for my piece on page 1, and almost all photos are a close fit. For example, if I was doing a photo manipulation with a cool splash effect I might search for ‘splash’ on their website.
The search results for ‘splash’ bring up some really lovely photos, almost all of which would be relevant to my photo manipulation. They are high res, clear, and mostly on an isolated plain background for easy extraction. No wasted hours searching for the right photo, simple!
Their Library is HUGE
Ok, so you may have noticed that I’ve mentioned their ‘huge’ photo library a couple of times so far. Well, you may be wondered just how many photos they currently offer.
Over 3.7 million and counting!
This massive number means that they will almost certainly have the photo you’re looking for. Best of all, they’re expanding aggressively, and more and more photographers are adding their portfolios to the website. In fact, in the last three months they’ve added a further 500,000 photos! This makes DepositPhotos officially the fastest growing stock photo website in the world.
Just some of the main categories at DepositPhotos, letting you easily browse their huge library
They’re Easy to Browse
Of course, a great library of photos is no good if they’re difficult to browse. Luckily DepositPhotos make browsing easy for you, through a few cool features.
Of course they have the standard categories, search and popular/latest files options.
However, they’ve recently implemented a ‘smart search’ feature. This means that when you start to type in their search form, ‘smart search’ kicks in, and suggests likely results for your search query, as well as related results. This is incredibly useful if you’re not quite sure what you’re looking for, or if you want a quick overview of search results without needing to browse through them. Just take a look at what happens when I type in ‘business’
Smart Search eliminates spelling mistakes, and also has a useful feature to show the number of search results.
The also have the useful ‘hover’ feature shown on some stock photo sites. However, even more useful, at DepositPhotos each hover box also shows details such as the image size, and description:
Special Offers
DepositPhotos have a number of awesome special offers running at the moment. Let’s take a look at two of them…
If you own a blog with an active, steady readership, you can obtain a free membership simply by posting a review of DepositPhotos, or better yet hosting a contest where they offer up a prize for your readers.
You can learn more and check out the terms and conditions here.
Special Program for Photographers
If you’re a high volume photographer with a large portfolio DepositPhotos would love to work with you. They even offer to help upload all your photos and help organize them. High volume photographers can often achieve VIP status, which achieves higher search results and fastest image inspection.
Learn more about the special program for photographers here
Free Subscription
If you’re still unsure about using DepositPhotos they offer a wonderful free subscription for a trial period. You can download 5 free images per day for 7 days with a free subscription, without any obligation to use their paid service or purchase future images.
Sign up for your free trial today
Check out DepositPhotos Today
I really hope that you enjoyed this review, and find DepositPhotos useful.
Interested in a Paid Review?
Whilst we will not be offering reviews very often, we will accept a couple of websites each month for review. Our reviews are totally honest, and we will only ever accept sites/services that we feel our readers will love.
- If you would like to submit your site for an in depth review, please contact us today.
About the Author:
Tom is the founder of PSDFAN. He loves writing tutorials, learning more about design and interacting with the community. On a more interesting note he can also play guitar hero drunk with his teeth.
16 Comments:
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thanks for sharing this site. Another site to find a stock photo
This looks like a great resource for images! Thanks for sharing
Thanks guys, I’m glad you enjoyed my review
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Do not give these people your financial info!!!
After I unsubscribed, they have pulled money from my PayPal account every month like clockwork. Paypal refunds my money but what a pain!! I have complained every month to Deposit Photos and all they say is that PayPal is refunding my money.
Must I file for a refund every month!!! Make it stop!!!
Stay far far away from this shady operation.
Hi Rhys. Whilst I’m not familiar with your personal experiences with them, you are able to cancel any Paypal subscription yourself at any time, so companies can’t continually draw funds from your account like they might be able to with say a credit card.
Rhys, did you try cancel it in your paypal account? Cos I had a sub there too and i didn´t know how to cancel and then i asked them and they told me, that they have no access to my paypal (of course and thankfully not!
)so i have to go to my paypal account myself, select the sub and click on cancel…
I did that and wasn´t billed ever again.
So maybe that´s the problem?
Other than that i think it´s quite a good option, since they have cheap offers and a good selection – a combination quite rare…
Take care,
Morris
I had a similar problem with DepositPhotos. I subscribed (didn’t do the free trial) for 3 days and didn’t realise it was a continued payment. I trawled through their site to find out how to cancel and was directed to go to the buyer menu, subscription and then subscription history. They advised to follow prompts from here to cancel. Surprise surprise there was nothing on this page to cancel subscription. I subsequently went to paypal and deleted the payment from there – I hope this works. I guess I’ll find out in a few days time. I sent numerous emails to them over the days and never got a reply. Shoddy. They have lost any future business they would have had with me due to this. I’m really annoyed – and that’s putting it mildly…
After turning off the recurring payment with PayPal, I ended up having to withdraw the use of that particular credit card in my PayPal account to make it all stop. I made the mistake of giving DepositPhotos one more chance with their more modest monthly subscription as the former one was just too many images and their selection is not that good. This time I used a different credit card but the problem is the same. My next step is to contact the fraud unit at my bank to stop the recurring payment. No company should ever do this to their customers! Recurring payment should be an option, not a mandatory requirement. I don’t see how DepositPhotos can even stay in business long-term using CUSTOMER RIP-OFF as their business model.
And regarding the image selection, I can only speak for the vector images, and I will have to say there isn’t a single image that I could not find elsewhere. I decided not to renew because some days I have no access to downloads. One time I could forgive, but it happens on a regular basis every few days. And if they do give you a one or two day credit compensation, they don’t ever notify you so by the time you look up at your invoice count and find it has increased, you find those credits already expired. This company is 100 times more trouble than it is worth. I’d rather pay more for a reliable subscription with good customer service and ethical business practices.
Stay away from this company! They looked good, bit I deposited $100 into my account, added 200 photos to my lightbox only to discover their web site won’t let you buy a lightbox like all other photo sites. One has to download each file one at a time. Tech support said that functionality, even through there are buttons on their site to do that, has never worked. Since I don’t want to waste 3 hours manually downloading I asked for a refund. They declined saying credits are not refundable even those none were used. I submitted a dispute with my bank. Stay away from these scam artists.
By the way, search for “DepositPhotos.com Scam” and you’ll find lots of complaints. Wish I did that first.
Hi Ken,
Thanks for the comment. I honestly wasn’t aware of this when I posted the review. I don’t feel comfortable removing this review, but I’m going to include a link in the post to refer people to the comments. I have heard good things about DepositPhotos (hence my positive review), but I think people definitely need to hear all sides.
Hey Tom,
Thanks for your review and thanks for letting all the comments even if there are negative reviews. It shows you are impartial! I had a similar incident. Depositphotos looked interesting and I decided to give it a try and I subscribed to their free trial. When you register, they ask you for your credit card.
But you have to be very careful because they MIGHT charge you the full monthly fee subscription (59.00$) even if you’re still on your 6th day! And then, when you talk to their customer service they can’t completely refund you! You have to choose between 50% refund or convert the 59$ to credits… I was really disappointed.
So for all your readers, if they want to try the “free trial”, they should use a PayPal account and cancel it on the 5th day directly from PayPal. I agree with you that the site can be good… they have good photos, cheap price, etc. but you just have to be careful not to get charged without your knowledge…
Hope it helps!
Thanks Elisabeth for your further information and comments. You’re right, I do want to be impartial and allow anyone to post their experiences here, good and bad. I never want to be dishonest in my reviews. As I’ve mentioned, I wasn’t aware of these issues when posting the review, and hope that people can make up their own minds after reading the comments here.
I am currently in the crisis mentioned above. I intended to submit my photos and accidentally subscribed as a user. First off: I immediately realized my mistake, found I could not cancel my account in the directions they have posted, so I sent them an email asking them to cancel my free trial. this did not happen and now I have a #59.00 for a service I will never use. I will try the above methods to resolve this, however I feel I may have to cancel my paypal account all together. Secondly: I got accepted a photographer, by sending them 5 photos. Once they said these photos are of their standard I needed to submit them into the system, BUT they came back saying each photo has something wrong with them “poor lighting” “over filtering” The exact same photos they used to accept me into the system! I am beyond frustrated and now loosing time (photo editing) and money. DO Not Use This Web Site! All the phone numbers are bogus (the ringing is a recording take a look at your phone when calling the 800 number) and the Live Chat never connects you to someone live. HORRIBLE HORRIBLE SCAM.
I have found that they are deliberately trying to hide the subscription information. They’ll show you the link if you live chat with them, but the link to cancel is actually a small link in a buy subscription page that directs you to paypal, where you must find the recurring payment and cancel it. It seems quite purposeful that there is no “Account” area where you can manage your profile and subscription. When trying to figure out how to reverse the charges, I found the customer service agent to be inflexible. I find that the site has too many photos – user submitted sure does have its ups and downs – and there is a lot of time vetting out duplicates, and lower quality images. They either do not empower their managers to make decisions, or are simply using this membership to get a lump sum at once out of people’s bank accounts without considering the effect on the customer. I am very disappointed with depositphotos.com and would never recommend them to other designers.
I have also had a bad experience with their Payment system.
I bought some Pay-As-You-Go credits and then was billed twice for it. When I queried this they say they auto renew, yet there was nothing on their site that indicated this. They have a no refund policy and would not refund the amount I was billed extra.
It seems as though they deliberately make the subscription info hidden.
What a scam!
Terrible site! Scam! I spent 50$ to download a stock video and when you would click download file it would do nothing! Asked tech support (probably india) what the issue was and they just put me in a loop and said its a technical issue.
This site is a nicely designed scam. Say away!