DreamsTime free – what is the catch? What is legal?

You could see that DreamsTime offer a week of free trial. 

Could you get some benefits from DreamsTime free?

Short answer it NO – in almost all cases you could take no benefits from the free period.

No? Why?

For your free period you receive images with watermarks only.

In fact they cannot be used for almost nothing, not (only) because of watermarks but because of legal restrictions:

Conditional upon your compliance with this Agreement, Dreamstime grants you a limited license to download Watermarked Media solely for evaluating/comping whether you wish to purchase a license to the Non-Watermarked Media according to the Standard Terms and Conditions applicable to your use. You may not use a Watermarked Media in any final materials distributed within your company or any materials distributed outside of your company or to the public or in any online or other electronic distribution system. You may not modify, alter, or remove any visible or electronic watermark, or disassemble, reverse engineer, or decompile any Media.

So if you choose your image stock site because of “DreamsTime free” – surprise, surprise!

Could we use DreamsTime for other purposes?

Yes. But I definitely don’t recommend it. Unless you have legal team to check all statements.

It seems much riskier because their offer clearly states “0 USD first week”. And later you find out you receive watermarked images with watermarks and legal restrictions for almost any usage.

Other bad surprises from DreamsTime paid subscriptions?

Example

1. You pay DreamsTime for a subscription.
2. You liked an image and purchase it in a resolution 90 MPixels for a real estate website.
3. You download it in 90 MP resolution. DreamsTime allows you to download t in 90MP.
4. You put it on your site and kaboom! You have violated DreamsTime terms of use.

Lets check another statement from their Terms:

For Web use, you must not use the Media at a width exceeding 1080 pixels unless it is included in your site`s design. If the Media is part of a design and manipulated accordingly, the Media width can be higher than 1080 pixels.

What does that mean?

Because they limit web usage to images with a limit to 1080 pixels width. In most cases, it is about 1 MP.

Yes, they allowed you to download 90 MP but using it violates their Terms. A violation almost 100 times.

Someone could tell “They allow more than 1080 px for website design”. If you put a huge image inside the website design, your website is going to load slowly - that is not a good approach.

How much is 1080px width?

Lets check resolution of a Sony phone from 2018:

3840 x 2160 pixels

That is about 8 MP.

What about resolution of phones after 10 years? And tablets? And monitors?

Here you could fine a Nokia phone from 2008 with resolution of camera 2MP.

What else to expect?

Absolutely no idea. Maybe DreamsTime would start charging extra for resizing. Or for adding saturation? Of for cropping? Who knows?

More

For legal terms read DreamsTime Terms in details.