How To Find Free Images For Your Blog
After reading Kevin Muldoon’s review of PicApp.com, I’ve though about sharing some tips on where and how to find free images to use in your blog posts, like I do.
I know for a fact (and Kevin confirms this too) that many bloggers use Google’s Image Search to find free photos to use on their blogs, which is cool, but not necessarily legal. Let me explain.
The Google bot has a nasty habit of indexing every information and file that is linked from your pages, which basically gives him access to the /images directory of every website. This can be fought by using a robots.txt file to prevent search engine access to directories and files.
By indexing these folders, Google will share through his results copyrighted images used to develop the websites, or images from professional photographers’ portfolios. So, these images are not free. And so says Google:
“Image may be scaled down and subject to copyright.”
So, why risk using copyrighted images when you have quite a few options of free or extremely low-cost photos available? Check them out below.
Free Photos from stock.xchng (sxc.hu)
Until now, stock.xchng has been my favorite tool for free images. Some of the images require a author notification of use, some don’t. They are all big, some have quite a high-resolution. For some topics you’ll find the perfect photo, for others, you’ll need to take a metaphorical approach, but still, they are free.
Free Photos from EveryStockPhoto.com
EveryStockPhoto is a service similar to stock.xchng, but check this out: they have 3,161,661 free photos in their database as I’m typing this. Definitely worth taking a look. Various photos come with various licenses.
Free Photos from PicApp.com
PicApp is a new website, currently in BETA stage, that lets you look (and use) for creative & editorial images. They are all high quality (like you would find on Getty Images), but there’s a downside. When embedding the image on your blog, a small animation produces when mousing over it, making way for some sponsored ads. True, the high price of the image rights don’t pay for themselves, and this is PicApp’s solution to provide high-quality FREE images. I would definitely recommend them if you’re running a celebrity or news blog. Paris Hilton, Geoge Cloney, Hillary Clinton, they are all there!
Free Photos from Photoree.com
Photoree is a service that’s searching Flickr database for images released under the Creative Commons license. After you sign up (free), you have the possibility of creating filters to display only images of interest to you. Thanks CTI97 for suggesting to add this service.
Free Photos from FreeFoto.com
FreeFoto has been around for many years and has a database of about 115.000 photos, organized in about 3000 categories. While some tech photos are a bit “old”, you’ll always find here nice travel images. They are free to use, but at a web resolution and with a link back and attribution. Higher resolutions are available for a price.
One Dollar Photo Resources
This is a somehow recent type of selling images online. Websites like Dreamstime.com, iStockPhoto.com and Stockxpert.com sell stock images for prices that go as low as one dollar. Basically, anyone can register and start submitting images that would generate revenue. By selling the images more than once, the owner can afford the low price for a very good quality. So, if your online activity generates enough income, these photos probably worth a $1 investment.
Other Resources
Some photographers share their work with the public, releasing their photos under the Public Domain license. You you’re one of them, or know one, add a comment and I’ll add it to this list:
Tight Budget?
No more! Now you can have your free or very cheap, but most important, LEGAL photos to spice up your blog!
Photo credits to Miguel Ugalde.
Post has been updated to include EveryStockPhoto.com and Photoree.com.
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My blog at keyboard-culture-global-warming.com now sees more than 7,500 unique visitors per month and I average 2 images per post, 3 times per week. So, I’m in the market for fresh images all the time. Stock.xchange used to have hardware problems but now runs smoothly most of the time. It is an excellent place to begin the quest for a specific image or theme. FreeFoto can be helpful, too, but I prefer the former. Don’t forget that if you have Microsoft Office installed, you can pull lots of free images from the Clip Gallery. The convenient redirect is dgl.microsoft.com
What do you know, I’ve never tried the MS Office solution. Thanks for the tip, and for both comments. This one almost got caught by Akismet because of the 2 links. Luckily I take a quick scan before deleting.
Very good roundup Alex. The one dollar websites look good, I’ll make a note of them
photoree.com for accesing very nice images from flickr with creative commons licence.
[…] on where to find free images to use in your blog posts.read more | digg […]
@Kevin: Glad I could help.
@CTI97: Thanks for your suggestion! I’ve included it in the list.
Hi!
You can use my photos for free at http://freeartisticphotos.com - all of them are taken by me and made Public Domain ; hope you enjoy them!
Cheers, Husac!
hope that you find this interesting!
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EXELLENT
I see some nice flower piks at http://www.budscape.net u’ll find many variants
Johl, since that is your website (pardon me if I’m wrong), I don’t see any copyright policy about those pictures. Further more, there are not that many pictures yet.
Thanks for the post. I’ve come across many people starting out in the Website Design industry either for profit or personal use and they do not understand the grasp of royalty free vs. non royalty free. A lot of images have legal restrictions and just because it’s posted on say Google or elsewhere doesn’t mean it’s free to be reused.
Great list here and a good start to avoid costly fees from places like Shutterstock or Ghetty Images.
Photoeverywhere.co.uk has 3000 travel related stock photos available under a creative commons attribution license.
GREAT post…something I’ve been wondering about lately. Keep it up!
If you are a Wordpress.com, Blogger.com, Typepad.com, and self-hosted Wordpresses from version 2.0 onwards you can use this Firefox add-on from Zemanta. It loads in the WordPress sidebar and links to free/CC images for your use and automatically embeded them in the post a credit line from where the photos is from.
I’ve been using it for a few months and love it! sure saves time as the images and links (oh yeah, Zemanta also searches for related links), well Zemanta scans your blog post and finds relavant images and links.
http://www.zemanta.com
Why did you refer to Google as “he” and referenced something of Google’s as “his”? It’s creepy.
@Steve Gibson & Tinch72: Thanks for your suggestions!
@hollymolly: “It” is not that “personal” and I prefer “he”, since Google is - sometimes - one of my best friends.
[…] că imagini se găsesc foarte uşor pe net şi nu ai neapărat nevoie să ţi le faci singur, e bine să ştii că le poţi şi folosi pentru […]
Another good free image source is creativecommons.org The searchable pictures all fall under the creative commons license.
Hi
I saw your article. It is very good. If you add image,logo or photo to an article it will look good.
I saw one photography search engine which will all provide all types of photos for you.
http://xcavator.net/
I’m creating a blog as of today. Thanks so much for the links you guys posted. I will definitely be looking through them =)
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
Don’t forget Wikimedia Commons. Everything there is free in the since of freedom. The public domain images are even better as there are no strings attached.