Images make your content easier on the eyes of your readership. They also make your posts shareable on the Social Media. Generally, you would have to pay for high quality images. However, there are ways to get royalty free images on the net.
As a matter of fact, I am about to show you 8 ways to find free stock images that you can use on your websites.
Labeled For Reuse Images From Google Advanced Search
Yes, of course you can use Google. Don’t use the normal Google Search, though. To find free stock photos, use Google Advance Search. Here are the steps to finding your desired images:
- Enter keyword of the image you wish to find
- Click on the Image menu
- Click on the Search Tools menu
- Click on Labeled for reuse option
Compfight.com Gets You Royalty Free Images Using The Flickr API
Here is a website that allows you to search for images you can use on Flickr. CompFight.com uses the Flickr API extensively. It is also very fast.
- Enter keyword of the image you wish to find
- Click on the Commercial menu
Wylio.com Embeds Flickr Photos With Attribution
Here is a pretty cool service from Wylio.com. You get to find, resize and embed the photos you want along with the required attributions. Photos are from Flickr.
A little bit of setting up is required. It integrates with Google account and PicasaWeb. Basically it stores the resized images along with the credits into your picasaweb album.
A free account (ads supported) allows you to embed 5 photos a month. Remove the ads and embed up to 125 images a month by upgrading to Premium level ($2.99 a month). Not good enough? A Pro level account gives you 1250 photos a month at $9.99 monthly.
Search Creative Commons Media
The Creative Commons Search page provides you with a number of search options. It’s a gateway to various other search providers. You can search for images at Flickr, Fotopedia, Google, Open Clip Art Library and Pixabay.
Search and Pin Photos With Attribution via PhotoPin.com
PhotoPin is a service similar to CompFight. The only difference is you have to manually download, resize and reupload the image into your web storage. PhotoPin also provides you with the necessary attribution links. Just copy and paste them in your website.
Foter.com – Need Free Photos? Enter Keyword
I truly love the statement I saw upon opening up Foter’s website.
“Need Free Photos? Enter A Keyword Above”
Its truly simple with Foter. Enter a keyword and then select the license type you require. That’s all there is to it.
If you are using WordPress, they also provide a plugin at http://wordpress.org/plugins/free-stock-photos-foter. However, when I activated it on this site, it disabled the Post Editor all together. Even the text editor was disabled.
I had to deactivate the plugin. Perhaps it’s conflicting with some other plugin. Will add my findings to this later. If you have an answer to this, do leave us a note about it. Would love to get it working on this site.
ImageFinder.co
This is a Creative Commons Image Search engine. It finds for you images on Flickr that comes with Creative Commons licenses that you require.
Search Free Images From Various Resources – EveryStockPhoto.com
This is a licensed specific free image search engine. Their image database comes from various source. Among them are Flickr, imageafter, NASA, photoXpress, stock.xchng and Wikipedia. You have the option to pick and choose the source of your search.
Which Of These Image Search Engines Should You Use?
You’ve got 8 options now. Which is the best? I would recommend that you bookmark them all for easy reference. Have a look at the results you get from all of them. Determine a couple that is to your liking.
As most of them have Flickr as their main source, you would probably see similar images returned by them.
It may not be the images that you like. You may find that you like a couple or more of their other features. Perhaps you would like some automatic attribution features or what not. Your choice.
Double Check The License.
Yes, the services did say they provide free images/photos. Still, you would want to double check on the usage rights of your selected photos. Contact the photo provider and owner directly before using it commercially. You don’t want to get in trouble if there is a mix up in license for the image .
If you do use any of the services mentioned above, do tell me about it. Do you like them? Why?