Big Price Increase at Getty Image's istockphoto.com

If you are one of the thousands of users of Getty Image's istockphoto.com service, you may be in for a new pricing sticker shock.

Getty's istockphoto.com recently introduced a much more expensive pricing scheme under the guise of a "reverse price split" on the price of its credits, which one buys with cash and then uses to purchase the rights to a stock image or illustration.

They basically took the old $1.50 credits (which used to be priced at $1.00) and reverse split the price 5:1. So now five old credits equal one new credit, which is priced at $12 each or three for $33.

This is significant in a few ways. Not only did the price go up by 60%, now the minimum image price is effectively $12 (one new credit). In the old system, there were lots of images priced at one or two credits, ($1.50 or $3.00, respectively). This amounts to an 800% price increase on their lowest priced photographs.

This is a far cry from the istockphoto.com Dollar Bin of yesteryear, where a while back you could get a decent generic image like a candy cane for $1 from this trove of low priced images. Now the minimum is $12, effectively a 1200% increase in just a few years.

It's a classic case of using a little mathematical slight of hand to obscure a significant change in pricing. We thought you'd like to know.