Stills — The New Standard in Photo Licensing — Is Now Live!

Offering quality imagery by in-demand photographers

Designers, business leaders, creative directors, art collectors, photographers, and others: Stills, the new standard in photo licensing, is now live. Offering a mighty collection of highly curated, beautifully composed, authentic photographs by real photographers high in demand, the newly released invitation-only platform will revolutionize photo licensing across the Internet.

I was happy to receive my invitation email to access the site today so that I could explore what Stills has to offer and document my experience along the way.

What’s it all about?

Stills is a new licensing platform built by creatives, for creatives. Stills eliminates the frustration of digging around the Internet for quality stock imagery. Designed by FM, it’s powered to provide the best content for you to take your design projects to the next level.

FM brands equip creatives with premium resources so they can deliver the most influential work of their careers. — fm.co

Whether you manage social media for your company, design web pages and websites, create digital content in any form, or love to collect quality works of art, Stills offers a beautiful collection of imagery by collaborating with artists and photographers whom you can commission to obtain licensing to use their work in your project. All the imagery you will find on the site is exclusive to Stills.

Access to Stills comes on an invitation-only basis. After receiving an invite and creating your free account, you can view any of the photos available on the site; however, to access downloads and other exclusive features, you will need to purchase a membership plan.

Having any of the membership plans also gets you access to what they call “the Vault.” The Vault is another exclusive offering to paid members; you’ll be able to access an exclusive collection of images set aside for limited licensing, meaning photos from the Vault can only be licensed a certain amount of times, depending on your membership plan.

What are the membership plans?

Stills currently offers 2 membership plans: a standard access plan at $8 per month per member and a pro access plan at $24 per month per member. There are also enterprise options available. It’s important to know that the membership plans will get you access to the Vault (the entire collection of photographs) but you will still need to cover the image licensing fees in order to use any of the imagery.

Both membership plans offer a free 7-day trial to begin, they both offer various respective perks, and they both allow you to downgrade at any time. You can also toggle the pay-annually button to be billed on an annual basis and receive 1 month’s membership free.

There are also enterprise options available that offer a host of features for large teams or companies looking to utilize large scales of licensed imagery.

What are the benefits?

Stills really sets itself apart in the vast world of licensed imagery by what it promises and how it carries out those promises. A very common struggle among designers is finding quality imagery among the massive pile of dull stock imagery across the Internet.

Though sites like Unsplash and Pexels work hard to solve that problem, an additional problem may also be that the vast majority of quality imagery that’s available online is likely also used by many others so your design project is not likely to stand out among others.

You can count on Stills to provide high-quality imagery for your projects. You also know you have a huge advantage over other designers because Stills ensures invitation-only access to the site.

You also get to support your favorite designers and photographers and enjoy using a beautifully-designed website with a variety of search tools and filters to help you find that perfect image.

Not only does the platform provide high-quality imagery, but it’s also expertly curated by Still’s sharp-eyed team, who accept less than one percent of the images submitted to them — so users can be sure the images they choose are the cream of the crop. — itsnicethat.com

This high level of curation also warrants a message of importance: getting an invite to Stills does not guarantee that your photos will be approved for licensing on the site. Subscribing to a membership plan also does not guarantee this.

What are some of the features?

The most noticeable features upon arriving at the homepage are the handy search filters on the left side. You also have some featured imagery shown to you immediately on the page.

Stills allows you to search for imagery using filters like: the number of people, color, orientation, lighting, shutter speed, camera angle, and artist.

From the top of the page’s navigation bar, you can manually search for artists or categories of imagery.

After creating your account, you can also create Boards, following the principal of Pinterest boards or Behance moodboards, which will hold your personal curation of photos that you build yourself.

I’ve created a board labeled Inspiration & More which I can’t wait to build over the next few days as I scour through the Vault.

Stills allows you to create Teams and add members of the site by email to your team as long as you have available seats. You can also tailor your email notifications from your Account Settings page. You can choose to be notified of blog articles, new photos, and big updates.

So far, I am thoroughly enjoying my experience using Stills to search through a plethora of highly curated imagery. I’m excited to see what other developments are planned for the future. I plan to use Stills for my future Medium articles in the near future in hopes that it will help my articles stand out. It’s a simple but beautifully designed tool for creative designers of all types.

Imagery in online articles and webpage design is crucial in order to make a lasting impression on the reader or visitor and not only draws attention to your material but also enhances it. I’m excited to see how Stills will continue to revolutionize the standard of photo licensing as we know it.

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