Images For Your Website

• Images

A Picture Paints a Thousand Words

Frederick R. Barnard published an article regarding the effectiveness of graphics in advertising called "One look is worth a thousand words", in Printer's Ink, December 1921. Barnard added "so said a famous Japanese philosopher, and he was right" A picture is worth a thousand words...

Images, if chosen correctly, can enhance your website, blog or article. Today with so many free images available to you there is no longer any excuse in not using images to enhance your website content.

Where Can I Source Free Images?

Below are a list of the most popular free images websites. If you Google the phrase "free images" you will find many more sites.

• Unsplash allows you access to free (do whatever you want) high-resolution photos. 10 new photos every 10 days.
• Pexels currently has over 2,000 photos with 35 new high resolution photos added each week! Free for personal and commercial use. Attribution is not required.
• Rgbstock has more then 100,000 stock photos, graphics, wallpapers and backgrounds for personal use or commercial work. Registration is required to download photos.
• Gratisography images are photographed by Ryan McGuire and free of copyright restrictions. You can use these high-resolution pictures on your personal and commercial projects. New images added weekly!
• Little Visuals offers a sign up facility to get 7 hi-res images zipped up in your inbox every 7 days. Use them any way you want.
• Pixabay contains over 380,000 public domain pictures, illustrations, and vector graphics. You can use any Pixabay image without attribution in digital and printed form, even for commercial applications.
• Magdeleine daily hand-pick and feature free high-resolution pictures. You need to check whether attribution is required before use.
• Death To Stock Photo founded by Allie Lehman & David Sherry offers free high-resolution photos every month in their newsletter. You may use the photos as you like but may not distribute them in any way. You can go premium for $10/month if you want access to the full library.
• Morguefile built in 1996 contains an impressive collection of photographs. The site has an excellent search tool which allows you to filter by keywords, categories, size, date, creative, rating, colour and geotag. No registration is required.
• OpenPhoto is a high-quality photo sharing platform which was created in 1998. OpenPhoto contributors offer their images for free under terms of Creative Commons licensing. Acceptable usage conditions vary from image to image so be sure to check what you can use each image for.
• Foter host over 200 million free Creative Commons images from many online sources and the entire system is also available as a WordPress plugin.
• Unprofound was setup in 2001 and has grown into a global collection of images. The collection can be used in just about any way you’d like. The only restriction is you may NOT redistribute the photos individually or en-masse, as photos, to any other websites or offline buyers. You don’t have to register to download images.
• StockVault has been around since 2004. Use the search facility to find the image you need. Images are categorised and are of excellent quality. You must register for an account.

There is also the option of purchasing images for your site if you cannot find a suitable image via the free images sites above. Many of the "paid for" sites sell images at very reasonable prices.

Paid For Images

• Depositphotos images are purchased via credit packages or subscriptions. Keep an eye out for a great Appsumo deal of 100 Depositphotos downloads (in any size and download credits don't expire).
• Dreamstime has been online since 2000 and has over 13,000,000 images available. Images are purchased via credit packages or subscriptions.
• Istockphoto started in 2000 and was later taken over by Getty Images. iStockphoto has a large collection of professional and business quality images and illustration . Images are purchased via credits through Pay-as-you-go, Subscriptions and Corporate plans.
• Bigstock was founded in the fall of 2004 and now offers over 11 million royalty-free photographs and illustrations. Photos are purchased via credit packs.

So what are you waiting for?