You know what we mean. You see the same stock photos everywhere on the internet. They’re on home pages for small businesses (and big businesses that should know better), clickbaity ads, and blog posts all over the show.
And they look cheeeesy.
Not to mention they also usually look super American and don’t represent the cultural diversity of Aotearoa New Zealand.
You don’t want your website or your brand associated with that kind of mess. So we’ll cut to the chase: if you can’t get your own photos, then we recommend using a Kiwi stock photo provider like these:
The stock images on this page were kindly supplied by Truestock.
The No. 1 mistake businesses make when choosing stock imagery
Please, please, please, don’t use free stock photos for important images, like the hero pic at the top of your website, or an ad that’s going to spread far and wide across the internet or the real world. It’s a guarantee that any decent image that you find in a free search on Pexels or Unsplash has already been used thousands of times, and your potential customers have already seen it associated with another brand (or worse, a scam or clickbait).
What should I do if I can’t afford stock photos for all the content I’m creating?
If you’re doing a lot of social media posts or blogs and just can’t afford to pay for photography, take your own pics, or create graphics, then you might have to use free stock images, and that’s not the end of the world.
If you can, try and use photos that you’re allowed to manipulate, and make them your own by applying a little bit of graphic design. Wordshop can create a set of graphic elements and filters for your brand that you can use again and again to make stock images look a little less… stocky… and a little more like something that fits with your business.
How much should stock photos cost?
The stock photo websites we recommend pay real photographers to get out there in Aotearoa and take quality photos. And to be honest, with that in mind, we think what they charge for those photos is pretty reasonable.
Expect to pay between $40 and $150 for a small image suitable for smaller website images or displaying on mobile devices.
For a big, beautiful hero image that stretches from one side of the computer screen to the other, you can pay between $75 and $350.
And for absolutely massive images you could plaster on a billboard, you’re looking at about $175 to $750.
New Zealand stock image sites
We like these stock sites because they use New Zealanders, they tend to be normal-looking people rather than airbrushed models. And because they’re Kiwi sites, you don’t see the same images on every second website and ad on the internet.
Truestock
This is our preferred option. Truestock has very reasonable pricing, bulk discounts, a huge range of imagery. The cooperative has a real focus on ethics and fairness. It’s one of the very few stock image suppliers in the world that directly pays the models (or everyday people) in photos whether the image sells or not (it’s usually up to the photographers to sort this out which can leave talent high and dry on the payment front).
Truestock will even send a photographer to get a new tailored pic if you can’t find exactly what you need. The team will take care of the location, models, photographer and art direction, which is a real pain to sort out if you’re organising your own photoshoot.
Picky
A little more pricy than Truestock, but comes with some cool options including the ability to buy RAW files for your Photoshopping needs, and setting a “market freeze” so nobody else can use your favourite photo.
Picky also pays models up front, and more than half of Picky’s photographers are female (it’s also a female founded and run company)
Dzyn Space
Heaps of nature and landscape pictures of Aotearoa, many of which are free and haven’t been widely used elsewhere. Premium images include clear-cut photos of objects, and illustrations, many of which are created in Dzyn Space’s graphic design app. Some of the premium images are very cheap. If you buy a premium photo for $25+, the photographer gets 80% of the sale price.
The Dzyn Space team are actively developing this site, so expect it to get bigger and better with more photos from professional Kiwi photographers.
app.dzynspace.co.nz/image-library
Note: This article previously included Photonewzealand, which now seems to have shut down. We have replaced it with information about Dzyn Space.
Compare New Zealand stock image sites
| Truestock | Picky | Dzyn Space | |
| Based in NZ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Photos of real Kiwis | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Diverse people | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Aotearoa landscapes | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Curated collections | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Bulk/membership discounts | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Custom photoshoots | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ |
| RAW files | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Bargain collection | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Market freeze/exclusive use | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Specially selected photographers | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ |