Often too much choice could be a bad thing and stock photography is a good example. For years lots of the household-name stock photography agencies would promote themselves as being the biggest and having the largest collections. If you have been paying attention though, you may have spotted that's not such a favourite selling proposition any more and many of the larger libraries are now desperately trying to find other ways to distinguish themselves in an overcrowded market-place.

The truth is, many photography users find giant stock image collections time-intensive and tedious to search, in spite of the improvements in photo search engine technology. The issue is, the scale of these collections has increased at a greater rate than the search technology has improved ... So in many cases, photo research has essentially gotten slower and more difficult. It's no surprise then that more photography-researchers are opting for smaller 'niche' photo libraries, when they need to buy stock photos on the web.

These boutique stock libraries do not even try and compete on volume and most of the time they cannot compete on price either ... But more photo researchers are heading to these image stock sites regardless, with a completely new set of reasons-to-buy.

Private service, close contact with the photographers, fresh original photographs, unique styles and subjects. OK, perhaps these are not totally new reasons after all , but they're reasons-to-buy which have been pushed to the back for far to long.

A lot of it goes back to the way the photo researcher values their time, and what type of value they put on finding the right photo fast. The best news for photographers is, more and more are prepared to pay a little bit more to bypass the tedium of a mass-distribution library and hone in on quality new images sooner.

So the next time you need to buy stock photography, take a pass on the massive stock image super-stores, and check out a few of the boutique collections instead ... You may be pleasantly surprised.