Answer 09 of 12

How do you download flower stock photos after paying?

What happens between the PayPal confirmation and the file on your disk, and how to recover a download that went wrong.

The flow is deliberately short: pay, download, done. No account is created, no password is set, and no mailing list is joined.

What happens

You press the buy button on an image page. A PayPal window opens. When PayPal confirms the payment, this site verifies the capture against the exact image and the exact amount before it releases anything, and then mints a download link tied to that purchase.

The download begins on its own. If your browser blocks it, the link is still live and the page shows it.

The link

The link is good for five downloads over seven days. That is generous enough to fetch the file onto a second machine or hand it to a colleague on the project, and short enough that a link leaking into a public document does not become a permanent hole.

The file that arrives is the original JPEG: full resolution, unmarked, with its metadata intact. The three-by-three grid you see on the site exists only on the previews.

If something goes wrong

The download never started. Reopen the confirmation and use the link directly. If the page is gone, see the next paragraph.

You closed the tab too early. The payment is recorded against the order id. Send us that order id, from your PayPal receipt, and we will reissue the link. Nothing about the purchase depends on your browser session.

The link has expired. Same answer: send the order id. A licence you have paid for does not lapse because a link did.

PayPal took the money but the page showed an error. This is the case the verification step exists for, and it resolves cleanly. The capture is recorded on our side against the asset. Send the order id and the file follows. If for any reason the capture did not complete, PayPal will not have charged you.

Keeping the file

Store the original somewhere durable and work from copies. Re-downloading is only possible during the seven-day window, and while we will help beyond it, a file on your own backup is faster than an email exchange.

Put the asset id, which appears in the file metadata and in your receipt, into whatever system tracks your project assets. It is the only identifier that ties the picture on the page to the licence you bought.

Free images

A small number of images are published at no charge. They download without a payment step and without a link expiry, and they carry the same commercial licence as everything else. They are there so you can test the workflow, the file quality and the colour handling before you spend anything.

If a page shows a price, it is paid. If it shows a download button directly, it is free. There is no third case and no trial that turns into a charge.

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