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There is no getting around the fact that many more photographs are currently available from stock photography agencies and local photographers than from CD-ROMs. This means that the traditional channels will continue to be a primary source of photos for a long time.

Nevertheless, digital stock photography has a number of advantages. For one, other than an occasional additional usage fee, anything on the disc is yours to use multiple times.

A second advantage of digital storage is indexing. Although stock agencies may have well-organized files, they cannot let you rummage through them each time you need a photo. In contrast, most CD-ROMs come with a thumbnail viewer, which allows you to quickly scan through small versions of each photo.

The downside of digital stock photography is quality. Although royalty-free photos are constantly improving, top photographers charge a lot for their work, which makes it impractical for CD-ROM publishers to use the best sources for images. However, they should be more than adequate for most business needs.

An additional quality issue is that even CD-ROMs have limited storage capacity. While it is possible to store several hundred high-quality photos on a CD, many contain well over 1,000 images. This means that some CD-ROM images may be unacceptable for high-quality brochures or presentations.