Photography and stock imagery for documents and reports
Not every organisation has a large photo library with high-quality, relevant and bespoke photography and even if they do, there is often a need to turn to a stock library to fulfill content that the in-house library cannot. That doesn't mean you have to end up using ‘too perfect’ people in unrealistic situations.
Here is a light guide to getting the most from license-free, stock images.
Budget
Set aside a budget for stock images if you can see you are going to need them. It does not have to be huge, but it is wise to get the design agency to include a budget in the estimate. Our’s range from £325–£500 for a typical report based on common libraries. If you need specialist images for instance, from the Science Photo Library or Mary Evans (for historical images), you will need a bigger budget.
Most libraries say they are ‘royalty free’, basically meaning once you have paid for it, you can use it, but not all operate in this way. Check the usage rights for any photo you want to use, some will restrict the time allowed to use the image, the region or country and even where it can be used for example, ‘editorial only’.
The design agency should advise you; if you make a copyright infringement it can be disastrous. Libraries have algorithms that seek out images used without the correct permission, this can mean big fees or even having to pulp entire print runs.
Search, selection and relevance
Brief the agency on what you needed to illustrate and any considerations they need to know about before the search. For instance, ‘we only work in south sub-Saharan Africa with children aged between 11 and 16 years old’. Bear in mind that most ‘standard’ libraries won’t illustrate some unique and specific criteria, so you may need a broader set of terms to get something you can use. The agency may need guidance and you, the client, are best placed to provide it.
There are lots of libraries that offer free stock images and they can be great, but be warned, they are likely to be used to death and you may end up seeing them all over the place. Resources like Wikicommons can be great, but they can also be of very poor quality. Nothing reduces the impact of a report, document or social media post than poor-quality images.
Get your agency to search and select and provide a ‘lightbox’ or a range of images to choose from. It is better to get the agency to do this because they will understand the image potential (see below, Image Content, Crop, flip and flop), review the quality and avoid the potential issues when they are imported into the document.
Style, light and tone
In an ideal world, all the images in your report will have the same style, lighting and tone (visual style). This is very hard to achieve, but it is something you should aim for. The designer should have in mind when selecting images that there may be potential to alter them (re-touch if necessary) to bring them into the same colour temperature (warm or cool/blue light for instance) and style.
Consider focal distance, again you may need to retouch images to achieve this. If your images are mainly with a short focal distance, the foreground being sharp and in focus and the background being out of focus, this style should be carried through the report or document. If you are commissioning photography, this is something you would need to communicate to the photographer.
All images have a style, be it reportage, product or more ‘set pieces’/studio. Try to align the style of your stock images with the style of images you already have in the report. This is insanely difficult but worth aiming for.
Any image can be adjusted to bring it closer to the style, if not perfectly, in line with other images in the report, it just takes effort.
Image content
It is easy to select an image from a library search, say ‘women driving a car’ and Bob’s your uncle; job done. But this can lead to red faces if you are not very careful. Take time to look at the search results in detail.
In this example, I’m looking for a ‘realistic’ person, so not too much of a model, driving a modern car in the UK. If I put those exact terms into the search, they are very specific.
Depending on the search engine on the site, it can be a good idea to put the country or continent as part of your search (for this example anyway), but if I were to search ‘women driving a car in Tonga’, I get nothing; the Tongan people are very unrepresented in stock libraries.
So you need to make sensible judgments, try different searches and the most important thing is to stop and take a very careful look at the image.
In my example, once I have filtered out the way too good-looking (I want realism, something most photo libraries seem to ignore*), I look at the background. Is she driving on the ‘right’ side of the road? What is in the background? If you can see the Arc de Triomphe and not Marble Arch (these structures are very similar), I will need to reject this image. I realise this is an extreme example, but there are lots of people who will delight in writing in and pointing out your errors.
Next, I look at the car dashboard. In this instance, my client supplies car manufacturers with sound insulation for the world’s most popular car manufacturers. I don’t want to show a dashboard from a car from the 1990s.
In addition, my client works with lots of manufacturers, so ideally the car should be unbranded, but still have a recognisably modern dash.
So you can see what started as a simple search, can become a quite complex selection process. The key thing is to look, really look.
I’ve seen documents where designers (not us) want to illustrate money in the UK and the image they used was an image of US dollars!
Finding images of real-looking people can be a struggle, and as I have said, adding the country does help. Perhaps if we all resist using those awful ‘Americanised’ (I have nothing against Americans) images, the libraries will stock more realistic images. It hasn’t happened in my 25 years in business so far.
Crop, flip and flop
When we are using an image in a report or brochure, we want them to face away from the gutter (or face toward the outer edge of a page). In a digital online report, when the image will never be seen as a spread, we want them facing right. It makes a subtle, but dynamic difference.
So the temptation, if your image isn’t facing the way, is to flip it. That’s fine, but take the time to look again. In the background, is there any shop signage or on the tablet, is there text? When you flip it, will it read right? It’s easy to overlook these details, the text will read backward. That’s not a good look.
The same applies if you ‘flop’ an image, this means changing the image not from left to right, but from top to bottom.
A key aspect for the creative to consider is the potential to crop. Cropping is a skill that is often overlooked. An image from a library may not be suitable because the picture of a school in Africa (for instance) shows the teacher pointing to the blackboard and today’s subject is Nigerian history. But with careful cropping, we might be able to suggest that this is a teacher, somewhere in Africa, teaching something. With careful cropping, your selected image can be more generic, perhaps an English lesson, or just a lesson, nothing specific.
Be very aware of dress and culture. Think about what your subjects will wear and their environment and check your selection. In the famous words of the Band-Aid song ‘Do they know it’s Christmas?’, probably not, as the aid was predominantly focused on Muslim countries!
Horizontal and portrait
Lastly, when searching for images think about how they will fit within the design. When you review the search results, take into account that you need an image that will crop and suit a landscape picture box, for instance. It seems obvious, but it is all too easy to select a stack of images, approved by the client and then later find that they don’t fit the design.
What I thought was going to be a short article, has turned out to be quite long, sorry about that. But I hope you can see that an image search that you may ask your annual report agency and design team to perform for you, needs careful consideration.
*And on that note, here is a funny story. A hipster complained about using an image of him, the article being about how all hipsters look the same. Well, I’ll let you read it: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/hipster-magazine-photo-lawsuit-mit-technology-review-a8813941.html