The Old Way Is Dead
Stock photo subscriptions: £200-500/month for generic images that everyone else also uses. Freelance photographers: £500-2,000 per shoot. Brand photoshoots: £3,000+. These were necessary costs. They're not anymore.
The New Way
AI image generation costs £0.03-0.10 per image. A month of marketing visuals costs less than a single stock photo download used to. And every image is unique to your brand.
How to Do It
Product Photography
Feed FLUX 2 Pro a description of your product and the setting you want. "Professional product photo of a white ceramic coffee mug on a marble countertop, soft natural lighting from left, shallow depth of field, minimalist background." You get studio-quality output in seconds.
Team Photos
Use AI-generated team imagery for presentations and marketing materials where real photos aren't available. Specify diversity, professional attire, office settings.
Social Media Graphics
Midjourney for eye-catching visuals. Ideogram for text-heavy posts. Generate a week's worth of social imagery in 30 minutes.
Blog Headers
Every blog post needs an image. Instead of scrolling through Unsplash for 20 minutes, describe the image you want and generate it in 10 seconds.
Ad Creative
Generate multiple variations of ad imagery for A/B testing. What used to require a designer and multiple revisions now takes 5 minutes per variant.
The Limitations
AI can't photograph your actual products (yet, without training a custom model). It can't capture real events or real people. And for regulated industries, you need to consider disclosure requirements around AI-generated imagery.
The Savings
A typical SME spending £300/month on stock photos and £1,000/quarter on photoshoots can replace 80% of that spend with AI image generation at roughly £20-30/month. Annual saving: £4,000+.
Automate Your Visual Content
OrcaScale builds automated content pipelines that generate, brand, and distribute marketing visuals at scale.