Free and Cheap Stock Images
How can you spruce up your presentations, brochures, blogs and other marketing tools with affordable and free stock images?
Aliza Sherman
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Free and Cheap Stock Images
Hi there, The Digital Marketer here, ready to help you put the power of the Internet and technology to work for your business.
Are you always in search of images to use on your website, blog or presentation or even your three-fold brochure? The Web can be a great tool for finding that perfect image.
I’ve been searching high and low for interesting images that I can get for cheap or free, but I haven’t found the one place to get them all. I have found a number of sites for stock images that are proving useful, but I tend to use them in combination. If one of them doesn’t have what I need, then I go to the next and almost always find at least something close to what I’m needing at the moment.
Avoiding Copyright Infringement
The first thing to remember before pulling images off a website for your own use is that you must – I repeat MUST – comply with copyright laws. I’m telling you this to help you avoid pesky legal issues in the future. If you do not ask for permission to use someone else’s image, you are at risk.
Some people will let you use their images for free if you credit them on your site, blog, or presentation. Some may even ask for a link back to their site from yours. Others might ask for a royalty payment for the right to use their image and if so, they usually set limits to the way in which you can use that image.
Here are some places on the Web where you can obtain royalty-free or low royalty images. A tip of the hat to Garr Reynolds and his Presentation Zen blog for a few of these as well as some of my Twitter friends who let me in on the resources they are using.
Give It To Me Free, Baby
Let’s start with free, because, well, I’m cheap.
The first site I’ll mention is Morgue File at morguefile.com. I didn’t know this but it turns out the term “morgue file” is used at newspapers to describe the file that holds past issues. I’d say this site has a mix of really good photos and some very amateurish ones. Each photo outlines details such as size, releases related to the people in the photos, and comments from the photographer such as “Please let me know how and where you use my image.”
Flickr has a Creative Commons resource where Flickr users can opt to offer their work under a Creative Commons license. Creative Commons is an organization and site that offers free tools so authors, artists, educators and others can easily tag their work to let the public know how they can or cannot copy what they’ve created.
You can find some beautiful images in Creative Commons, but you’ll also find a fair share of “eh” ones as well.
For a more concentrated search of royalty-free images, try the photo search engine EveryStockPhoto.com.
Okay, Maybe I’ll Pay a Little
If you are looking for a little more consistency in image quality, you’ll probably need to pay a little something.
iStockphoto.com offers images for as low as $1 to $3 US and pricing is mostly based on the size of the image you need.
Another cheap site with nice images is StockXpert — that’s Stock X-P-E-R-T.
If you are looking to test drive a pricier stock photo house, you could tap into the fabulous Getty Images collection. They offer a royalty-free service where they own the image, but you can purchase the image based on the resolution you need and use it as long as you want. The cheap end is around $49 for low resolution images and prices can go up to $300 to $400 US for higher resolution images.
Bottom Line: There are many free and cheap resources for obtaining stock imagery for company use. Read the usage guidelines carefully to make sure you don’t violate any copyright laws or agreements and make sure to give credit where credit is due.
Contact Me
That’s all we have time for today. Visit the show’s website at digitalmarketer.quickanddirtytips.com for links to all of the sites mentioned in the show. If you’d like to ask a question or request a topic for The Digital Marketer, email me at digitalmarketer@quickanddirtytips.comcreate new email or leave a message by calling 206-339-6279.
If you would like more information about keynote speeches, workshops, or other appearances by me, Aliza Sherman, host of Small Biz Tech Girl, visit www.mediaegg.com for details.
The Digital Marketer’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Building Your Business With Web Tools is part of the Quick and Dirty Tips network at quickanddirtytips.com. Tune in for another business boost from The Digital Marketer, the host who’s not afraid to go under the Internet’s hood & get a little dirty!
Resources
Copyright image courtesy of Shutterstock