As you may know most of the images in internet are copyrighted. In the same way texts are usually copyrighted as well. Still there are millions of images which are totally free to use and you can find them in seconds.
Adding relevant images to your website is highly important. People are visual by nature. We grow up by reading books with a lot of images and a visual characteristic never leaves us.
With good and relevant images you make your content more readable and attract more visitors. Relevant images make the text also easier to understand and to remember what you are saying. But where to find free images?
Free Image Sources
- Your own personal camera
- Screenshots that you take
- Wikimedia.org
- Sxc.hu
- Stokpic.com
- Freeimages.com
- Pixabay.com
These are good examples of the ways you can find free high-quality images. There are other websites also but with in these websites you already have millions of images.
Many of the free images are very high-quality and taken by professionals so you don’t have to worry will you find good images. You will!
If you take own photos there is of course your personal touch and it can be fun. The drawback is that sometimes it may take more time and always the reward for the used time is not worth it. It depends what you are looking for but of course I encourage you to use the good quality images to make your website more appeal.
My Favorite Way to Find Great Images
Did you know that you can also find free images from Google? I will give you step-by-step instructions.
1.Go to Google Images and click settings and Advanced Search
2.Type in the “all these words” box what do you want to search.
3.Scroll down and in the last “Usage rights” sections, use the drop-down to choose what kind of license you want to have for the images.
4.Click advanced search and you can see all the photos that are free to use. Here are three free examples that I found from Google with the search “Images”. What do you think about the quality? I think it’s good enough :).
I use Google search many times because it gathers photos from many different websites so I can spare my time when I don’t have to search photos from many sites. Still I sometimes use other sites mentioned above to find more exact, relevant or higher quality photos.
Read the Rules
I just want to mention that there are different rules in different sites so you may want to read the rules before using the images from the new site.
Sometimes happens that someone adds images to a “royalty free” sites even though he/she doesn’t have copyright for the photo. It’s hard to know when this has happened but just be careful when you are using free photos.
There are also a lot of paid photos in internet but in my opinion there are enough free photos to use. But ifyou need really world-class quality photos for something particular it’s also possible to buy them from internet. If you are interested in photographing you can also start your own business by selling photos in internet but there’s a lot of competition.
I hope you found this article helpful! If you have any questions or comments, leave them below!
Where do you get the photos for your website?
Pixabay is great and I have found some great images on there that I have included on my current website. It’s great that there are sites like this because not everyone wants to pay for images or take their own images. It would be great to be able to use your own images for your site but I’m sure a lot of people just aren’t the best with a camera and don’t have the opportunity to take the perfect picture of what they want.
Yeah, Pixabay is great. Another thing that I like to use a lot is taking screenshots.
Hey thanks for this post it’s great as an online marketer i am always looking for good quality image and free is always good ha ha. Thank you for providing such a good resource for finding tons of free photos this is much appreciated and I liked very much the screenshots to demonstrate exactly how to use google to find royalty free or copyright free images Thank you cheers 🙂
Thank you very much, Peter, for your thoughts and encouragement. I’m glad you liked it. Finding great images is certainly an important part of the website creation and online business. It’s wonderful that there are so good resources to find royalty free images that one doesn’t pay even a single $ for the images if he doesn’t want to.
I wish you all the best!
-Roope
I forgot to mention, you and I are using the same theme! Iconic One.
Nice to hear that! I like Iconic One because it’s quite simple but it still looks good. 🙂
-Roope
I am a regular at Pixabay, their photos and the software system are just so easy. Nice post.
I agree with you Sandi. Pixabay is certainly a great place to find images. I use many images from Pixabay also.
I wish you all the best
-Roope
I use a mix of free images and paid as sometimes I can’t find what I’m looking for free.
So I do like to have a paid option as it doe’s come in very handy at times and I don’t have to worry to much about licenses.
I generally find what I’m looking for at fotolia which have a credit system.
Thank you for sharing your experiences Joel.
Yes, paid images can be a quicker way to find something you’re looking for. I haven’t used Fotolia but as I watched their website a bit it seems very useful and the prices don’t seem very expensive. Thank you for sharing the idea.
-Roope