One of the challenges with using stock photography (besides the fact that others can use it too) is that the cost is nearly out of reach for many Web professionals and designers. Creative Commons, while helpful, does not really provide the deep creative library one would hope.

New photography site Snapixel hopes to correct all that by combining elements of the photo sharing site Flickr and the popular stock photography site Istockphoto. The service's recently announced Openstock offering is a system that provides photographers with an easy-to-market solution to sell photos.

"The Snapixel model extends selling power to all levels of photographers. While not every image belongs in a stock photography marketplace, our ultimate goal is to widen the creative spectrum of traditional stock photography, without decreasing the value," said Ivan Wong, COO and co-founder of Snapixel.

Built using the Amazon Web Services(TM) cloud-computing platform, Snapixel offers photographers of all levels to opportunity to upload and organize their photos. Photos for sale can be distributed with a standard and extended license, or Creative Common licensing can be applied to images that are not for sale. Photos can be easily purchased with Snapixel credits, and prices vary depending on the license type and size of an image. Most of the images found by Website Magazine (even those of high resolution) were in the five to twenty Euro range.

Snapixel offers 1GB of free storage or a premium package for unlimited storage.