Hopefully, you already know that it is NOT legal to download an image from Google Images and use it on your website. Right? Often, you’ll find the perfect image on Google Image Search that would be just right for your website, brochure, or blog. But the fact is—it is considered Illegal to use any image that holds a copyright without the owner’s permission or without purchasing a license that grants that permission. You may not get caught, or you may get a cease and desist letter from a lawyer… or you may even get sued by Getty. We don’t want that to happen to you. And the fact is, the image on Google Images may not even be large enough or high-quality enough for you to use in a print application. That’s okay, though, because we have plenty of stock photo resources that are inexpensive or even free.
FREE Stock Photos and Images
We have used these sites for years and found plenty of decent images that can be used legally for your business or personal website:
Everystockphoto – This is the most comprehensive source for free stock images, searching multiple resources at once. For this site, we recommend clicking the “Advanced Search” link next to the search bar and unchecking Flickr as an option. Sometimes, you can use a Flickr image under a Creative Commons license, but you have to check each image individually. Some will require you to credit their image; some will only allow their Flickr image to be used for non-commercial applications; and some will not actually allow you to use their Flickr image at all. Frankly, we’d rather not deal with the hassle of having to investigate each image—and there is plenty of garbage on Flickr anyway.
Freeimages.com – After your search, be sure to click the tab that says “Free Files”; otherwise, you’ll be looking at a combination of free and paid stock search results.
Vecteezy – Vecteezy is a huge collection of free vector art, including vector graphics, Illustrator brushes, tileable vector images, and silhouettes. There are alternatives to Vecteezy, such as All Free Downloads, but the Vecteezy site is less spammy. To find free options, skip over the images that have a “Premium” tag at the beginning of the search results.
Iconfinder – This website has tons of free icons. Just make sure you follow the licensing requirements, if any. Some do not allow commercial use.
Death to the Stock Photo – This is a quirky resource for stock photos that are very hip. Think Instagram-ready. If you sign up for their email newsletter, once a month you’ll be emailed a link to download a set of photographs by that month’s guest photographer. There is also a premium version that gives you access to past photos.
Unsplash – The aesthetic for Unsplash is very similar to Death to the Stock photo, with lots of breathtaking landscapes and modern architecture submitted by pro photographers. Not only can you download any image on the site for free and use it in any way you want, you can also subscribe to their email newsletter and get ten new photos in your inbox every week.
Paid Stock Images
Thank goodness, the days of awkward photos of white guys in suits shaking hands are ebbing away. It used to be that you could only find well-lit, naturally posed photos of diverse people on the high-end stock photography sites like Getty. Now there are tons of options for great stock photography, but here are two of our favorites. Shutterstock and iStock have some good options too, but we don’t like that the credit system they use to charge for images. It’s unnecessarily complicated, and you always seem to have unused credits lingering in your account.
Adobe Stock – Adobe offers a subscription that allows you to download 10 images per month for $29.99, or $2.99 per image. You can generally download an image on their site for $9.99 per image.
Stocksy – Again, we like that the pricing is very straightforward and the images are very modern and high quality. You can buy a small, medium, or large version of an image for a set price, and if you discover later that you need a larger version, you can just pay the difference. We also love that when you find an image, it shows a gallery of related images right below it, so you can find coordinating shots or compare it to similar images right there.
We hope this helps you! If you’d like to get started on a website, did you know that stock imagery research is part of our process? Contact us now for a consultation.
