On the 8th October 2007, Alamy released figures that it had reached 10,000,000 images in its library. 10 million! Their turnover for 2006 was £13.8 million/$24 million. That’s a lot of images and turnover for a family run business. An unreliable source suggests that Getty has around 2 million. I thought they would have more than that but even so, 2 million is a lot of images to look through. If the Getty figure is correct then they have fewer images than some of the relatively new microstock agencies. Shutterstock and Fotolia claim 2.5 million and 2.9 million images respectively.

Of course even these are only a small drop in the ocean of all of the images available from hundreds of other stock agencies and that’s not even counting the free ones. To put this into perspective, imagine there were no such things as search engines and you were looking for an image and had to look through them randomly. Now imagine spending only 3 seconds looking at each image. It would take you 34.5 days to look at only 1 million of those images and that’s without a break, no time to eat, sleep or even blink. Just to look at the images of the 4 agencies mentioned on this page would take you over 1.5 years. Add into that the fact that you do actually need to sleep, let’s say 8 hours a night and you are talking 2.5 years of every waking moment.

I don’t know how many stock photos there are for sale but a conservative estimate would be in excess of 1 billion (1,000,000,000) but I’m betting there are many more than that. It also makes me wonder how I manage to sell any images at all with my puny, in comparison, contribution. That means close to 50 years of looking at each one for only 3 seconds each.

All I can say is thank goodness we have search engines!