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Where to find free images for your website or blog may be a challenging task if you don't know where to look. And even if you find such images, a million questions come to mind: are the images copyrighted? May I use them on a product I want to sell? Do I need to credit the photographer? In this MasterNewMedia guide I would like to help you by sharing a) some recommendations for all independent web publishers out there and b) a list of the best free and paid image libraries available on the Internet.
Photo credit: Darren Hester
Let's start with some tips:
- Do not look for your images on Google or other search engines. If you are a serious publisher you may want to rely on traditional stock photo libraries like iStockPhoto or on trustable authors and photographers who have made their work available on the Internet, either for free or for a fee. But you do not want, in any case, to browse the web and steal indiscriminately images from other websites.
- Always provide full credit and a link back for any image or photo you download from the Internet. Even if you purchased it. By giving credit you respect other people's work, you prove to be an ethical publisher and you also provide visibility and exposure to the producer of the image you are using.
- Pay greater attention to the license of the image you want to use. Depending on how the photographer released her work, you may not be able to use the image commercially, to make edits to it, to display the image more than a x number of times, and so on. Check carefully what you can and cannot do with your images.
- Distinguish between "free" and "royalty-free": these are two completely different animals. A free image is free to download and use for as long as you want and wherever the author allows you to. A royalty-free image instead is an image that you pay for once and then use where and when you like without spending an extra dime (unlike traditional copyrighted images where you pay royalties every single time you display an image.)
And now my updated collection of online image libraries, personally checked and reviewed:
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Getty Images RF
http://www.gettyimages.com/CreativeImages/RoyaltyFree
Getty Images RF is the royalty-free version of the popular digital library Getty Images, where you can find a wide variety of pictures, vectors and illustrations, both for personal and commercial use. You need to register to use this resource.
All images on Getty Images RF are available in the JPEG format, and their resolution ranges from 72dpi to 300dpi, according to their size. Prices for each picture vary from $5 to $525.
F11Digital.com
http://www.f11digital.com/
F11Digital is a web-based image collection dedicated to digital photography, where you can browse and download royalty-free images to use for complementing your creative projects. Registration is mandatory to download, to vote and to comment the photos.
All images are in high-resolution, in the JPEG format, and they are available in different sizes. You can download the pictures to your computer by clicking the download button below every image (a ZIP download option is also available), or by sending them as an e-card (a digital postcard). F11Digital also allows you to save the images you like most while browsing the collection, with a digital lightbox (a non-intrusive digital notebook who follows you around the site and keeps track of all the photos you ask it to "remember").
FreeFlowerImages.com
http://www.freeflowerimages.com/
FreeFlowerImages.com is a website that collects images of flowers that you can use for your commercial and personal projects. You can browse through the photos by using either the search field or the list of categories. You can also find the pictures you need by looking at the colors of the flowers.
All the images are available in high-resolution, JPEG format and a size of 640×479 pixels. You can download them with a simple right-click action. The images contain no watermarks and you can request the website owner a larger version of your favorite photo in case you need a higher resolution.
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