27 Oct 2015 Envato Launches ‘Unstock’ Collection of Natural Images

Envato have just started experimenting with photo collections.

Announced via the Envato blog, the ‘Unstock’ collection contains 2,000 of the better images from some of the better contributors, focusing on “natural, raw and fresh” imagery.  The images are very strong on currently popular style elements, more commercial than Stocksy and less real than Offset.

The name “Unstock” and the strike-through of the word “stock” in the homepage header says they’re aiming down that authentic, not-stocky track that is so hot right now. While the images are certainly above average for microstock, you can see in the screenshot below that there’s still a lot of stocky images in the Unstock collection.

Unstock photos are priced at $5 for the full resolution, testing simpler pricing and delivery (no sizes).  $5 is the price for the ‘large’ size for PhotoDune images, which range from $1 to $7. Some of the images are exclusive but all come from existing contributors. There’s no Extended License available, testing simpler licensing.  The previews are pretty large, and the watermark is extremely subtle – a line at the bottom – testing user experience and image security.  But as they say, this is an experiment, and they’re testing a lot of new things. And knowing Envato, the participating contributors were consulted and all opted to participate.

Unstock is not yet searchable, and not available on the PhotoDune site, although there is a prominent link back to the dedicated Unstock site.  No doubt this aspect will change if the experiment is successful.

A header bar announcing the new collection is out on all Envato sites, exposing the collection to all 5 million+ members.