Pictures are great. They can help show a story, illustrate a concept, or send a message. In websites, blogs and books, photos can be used to break up long passages of text or capture a prospective reader’s attention. But chances are you don’t have quality pictures of coffee beans, the Eiffel Tower or a wide eyed squirrel waiting to be used. Sometimes the image you need for a particular project won’t be in your image library. And that’s where stock photos come in.
Stock photos are a wonderful resource to anyone who uses pictures for projects, either digital or print. Look at the header image for this post; a simple stock photo and large text help draw the reader’s attention to content of this blog post. Large, quality images are a surefire way to visually draw someone to important information on a page. And, if you recall our post about using Pinterest for social media, pictures are a great and easy way to let people “pin” your blog post or website. Pictures with text are even more popular on Pinterest, because they let users quickly see what sort of content they are pinning, and invite them to click on the image and explore your web page in detail.
So stock photos are useful. They can be a powerful tool in advertising a website or getting a message across. But what about actually finding these magical instruments? How do you sort through the millions of photos on the web to find high quality, interesting pictures? Here’s a hint: don’t start with a generic web search. Instead, try using a stock photo website. Most stock photo websites have a search bar, and have photos grouped into topics. If there isn’t a search option, I encourage you to explore the website anyway! You might find creative pictures that fit the project you need them for, even if they weren’t what you had in mind. Or you might find pictures you could use for a later project. Sorting through stock photos can take a bit of time, depending on how picky you want to be. But to sort through stock photos on a whim, it might be useful to know a website or two to start.
There are two routes to acquiring stock photos.
- You pay for them. The photographers will let you use their photos as long as you pay them their royalties. Popular stock photo websites, such as iStockphoto and Shutterstock, let you pay depending on the size of a particular photo. Others might have a monthly/yearly fee that lets you download unlimited photos.
- You use royalty free photos. These are free pictures you can use. However, you’ll need to read the licensing info for each picture. Some photographers want credit in the form of a caption or link to their work when you use their photo. Others will only allow non-commercial use of their photos. And others will let you use their photos for any type of use. Make sure to read the fine print before downloading any stock pictures you plan to use online.
Here are a few website suggestions to get you started if you want to take the plunge into stock photography:
- Pixabay.com – not the largest archive, but it has a great search feature. Has both traditional photos and vector (cartoon-like) images.
- Freedigitalphotos.net – a fairly large archive with traditional stock photos.
- Freeimages.com – similar to freedigitalphotos. Substantial image archive and quality traditional photos.
- Unsplash.com – a great, high quality archive of diverse photos. Less pictures of people and more creative photos. There’s no search feature, but you can search thumbnails of all the photos by clicking on the archive button.
- Freerangestock.com – a smaller archive, but lets you search for photos. A few amateur photos mixed in, but still good to search through. Must register (for free) to download pictures.
Scouring the internet for the perfect picture can be quite fun, and have a serious impact on your website/blog/poster/pamphlet/etc. So go ahead, give it a shot! Spice up your latest project with some fun photos. After all, sometimes you really do need a photo of a cow in rollerblades.