This is only tangentially related to Ae, as I'm doing some TV spots, and need stock photos to bring in and do some animations to - the pseudo 3D effect.

I have a beef with the low-budget stock houses like Pond5, Shutterstock, BigStock, iStockPhoto, etc.:  Most of what they have is pure crap. Their search engines suck; returning hundreds of irrelevant results, and numerous duplicates, wasting my valuable time.

I know that you get what you pay for and if you want quality, you have to go to Getty, but my client doesn't have the budget to spend $1000 for each shot.

There may be some middle ground sources that I don't know about.

Can anybody recommend other sites, with useful photos that look like they came from real life or photojournalism, and not a bunch of hokey staged garbage with bad actors?

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