Affinity Photo is a software solution for photography and creative professionals, a fully-loaded photo editor integrated across macOS, Windows and iOS, from Serif Ltd.
$21.99
one-time fee
Pixabay
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
Pixabay headquartered in Germany offers a digital content platform, which they present as a community for sharing copyright-free images and videos. All contents are released under Creative Commons.
For single-person teams or very small teams, I think Affinity Photo is great as it has a one-off cost and no ongoing subscriptions. If people are familiar with the Adobe products it might take a period of adjusting to Affinity Photo. It might also be overkill for some people's needs. But it does offer everything and room to grow. So weighing up what you need to do with photos and seeing if it fits is important.
This is perfect for any individual or organization that's working on a budget. You'll get stock photos that, while there's a more limited selection than the usual paid sites (Getty, iStock, etc.), are often just as high-quality. For smaller businesses and nonprofits where every dollar counts, I've found myself leaning on Pixabay quite a bit for stock images and, from time to time, will end up buying one of the linked commercial images when Pixabay doesn't have what I need. However, if you have a large budget for stock images, Pixabay will likely not be your best choice, as the paid services offer generous discounts for bulk credit purchases.
Almost all of Adobe Photoshop's features for a fraction of the cost. It was an easy decision for our organization.
The interface and most of the features are an almost mirror image of Photoshop. Flat fees instead of high yearly fees are much more desirable for our small team.
They have a great support forum for the little one-offs that aren't quite like the Photoshop app, or don't have the same exact name as Photoshop. The forum really helps when this happens. The YouTube support from the company and other users has been very helpful as well.
I use Sketch as my primary vector design tool. Affinity allows me to take a .ai, .eps, or other proprietary format and convert it to .svg for use/manipulation with Sketch and back. I can't say enough for this feature. It has helped me stay less pigeon-holed into Adobe products, which have lacked innovation for a long time in my opinion.
Separate photos, illustrations, and vectors—Many competitors have these images all lumped together with a limited ability to sort through them, while Pixabay has a robust library of all of these, making it easy to find what you're looking for.
Free, high-quality images and easy-to-understand licensing rules—Often a new client will have bad image usage habits, freely snagging any image off of google. Pixabay is an excellent resource to give clients a huge range of photos without the fear of getting into copyright trouble.
Sound effects—Free, good-quality sound effects are surprisingly difficult to find amongst competitors, but Pixabay has them in their lineup as well.
One thing that kind of sticks out is that with so much to choose from, you can feel overwhelmed.
Some of the photos I sometimes can find separately by googling. In the music business, it seems like many photos rotate on the web so there isn't as much to pick from.
I didn't see an option for more vertical videos for use in Instagram or TikTok.
For a regular user of Photoshop, Affinity is a very easy transition. It has all the same features and once you adapt to it, and it provides a quick return on investment.
A lot of times, it can be difficult to find things on a website. Pixabay search works extremely well. This way we don’t have to search and keep searching. The results along with the recommendations are very tailored and work well
I don't have direct experience with a member of Affinity's support, but their forum and YouTube videos that other users have made make it relatively easy to find similar features in Affinity that are available in Photoshop or Illustrator. The differences are negligible for our small, yet experienced team.
I think Affinity Photo is on par with Adobe PhotoShop. They are very similar products with both bringing many features users need. The main reason I picked Affinity Photo was its pricing of it. I didn't require Adobe products all the time. And felt they weren't offering me as much value.
Pixabay has given me the free vectors I need for my whiteboard animation videos, which aren't available on the other sites, in addition to the video and audio clips. They've been around for a long time and have stayed consistent, valuable, and easy to use throughout the years. They were my first site for free downloads and remain my favorite image download site to this day.
