Where To Find Free Images For My Blog

Mini-Guide, Part 1

Finding quality images and photos for complementing an important article, essay or news report is already a challenge for many. Imagine when the goal is not only to find good images, but also to find some that you could openly and freely use without needing to pay royalties or one-time publishing rights.

Nonetheless the task would seem, at first, a tough one to carry out; however, times are changing fast, and there were few and little-known online free image resources available — until today. New ones are appearing and offering a great assortment of quality pictures, an alternative to the expensive ones at traditional stock image libraries.

But as long as your subjects do not require photos of art masterpieces stored in world museums, or faces of popular stars, you may be likely to find highly interesting visual alternatives by exploring the world of free and grassroots image clearinghouses.

It's never been a secret that I feel one of the best resources of grassroots free images online is the Stock Exchange at http://sxc.hu, It's an impressive collection of many high-quality photos taken by amateur photographers from around the world. As a matter of fact, you can be one of the many contributors to this outstanding and fast growing image clearinghouse.

The images displayed at the Stock Exchange are searchable in multiple ways and offer thumbnail views that are large enough to provide a good glimpse of what the shots contain (unlike other alternative image libraries that have reduced the size of these thumbnails too much, which makes it harder to appreciate the image's content without loading a larger version of it — adding a lot of time to the overall searching process).

The Stock Exchange archives more than 100,000 images for which the photographers have established re-usage terms, leaving most of them available for immediate re-use.

But, it's difficult to access the Stock Exchange at times due to the increasing demand and the need to move everything to larger and more powerful servers. Until it settles down, this is the perfect time to look around and break out of the soothing and rewarding experience sxc.hu has been creating.

Here are interesting alternatives:

Fotogenika.net
http://www.fotogenika.net/modifica/igallery.asp

Fotogenika.net contains photos sorted into a handful of categories with subcategories. Images from this site "may be used freely for personal, educational and non-profit projects. You may not used them commercially, claim authorship and/or sell them."

A category page displays subcategory folders with thumbnails or thumbnail images only when there's no subcategory. The thumbnail pages display a brief description, a vote button and the number of views. When you click an image, its full size displays along with a disk icon so you can download it.

Some categories only have one page of photos while others you need to click Next to see more. It's a well-organized site that's easy to use and has a lovely collection. Its submission page rules clearly indicate the site aims to provide high quality images and it shows.

Finding Images Online
a Directory of Web Image Sites
by Paula Berinstein
http://www.berinsteinresearch.com/fiolinks.htm

To bloggers and online publishers.

No matter which sources you use, I recommend always crediting and — where possible — informing the authors that their work is used and published somewhere. To someone who has been so generous to offer his creative work for your own use, it is not much to offer full credit, acknowledgment, a link back and information about where the image is used. In this way, we allow the authors to use such free use for good credit and to show potential customers how their work is used.

To photographers.

The ageless issue of "How do I get work as a photographer if everyone wants me to have some experience and credential first?" is finally solved.

Expose some of your good photographic work for others to use and leverage the good exposure, visibility and credentials generated by this to build your reputation and price when bidding for work.

I am interested in listing other similar resources that you know about.

Mayang's Free Textures
http://www.mayang.com/textures/

Mayang's Free Texures is a library of over 3000 textures from architecture, building, fabric, man-made items, metal, nature, plants, stone and wood. Images are high quality resolution at 1600x1200 or larger with most at 2560x1920.

All images are free for all uses except for selling and they appreciate credit. The site has a mailing list for those who wish to be notified when new textures are added.

The download limit is 20 textures per day. The site lets you know how many you've downloaded. Each image comes with a caption describing it. The aerial view of Paris and other locales are amazing. Not all images look like background pictures especially the autos collection. So don't let the term "texture" throw you off.

Free Large Photos
http://freelargephotos.com/

Free Large Photos contains a collection of over 600 images and allows others to use the photos as long as credit is given and it's not used for making money. An RSS feed is available for the collection and here are the most requested photos.

Click any image to view its page and its full sized version and its categories. Each image comes with a short caption. The Paris Opera Garnier photo is gorgeous.

Get images covering outdoors, nature, travel, transportation and more. While it's a small collection, it's well done.

NationsIllustrated
http://www.nationsillustrated.com/

NationsIllustrated showcases pictures from around the world with over 7,000 photos in its collection. Discover new worlds and hidden places by browsing through new photos, most viewed and top rated photos. Start exploring by picking a continent and see where your travels take you.

The terms of service isn't clear regarding photo use. However, you can select the images you like and add them to your downloads list. Once you've collected all the photos you like, download them as a zipped file. You don't have to register to take advantage of this feature.

You can send photos as an e-card and rate them. Every photo's detail page contains its file name, album name, size, dimension and more. The site also has a search tool for finding images by keywords. Some photos are breathtaking and give you insight into the beauty of our world.

picsearch
http://www.picsearch.com/

picsearch is an image search engine that uses its own technology to crawl the Web and index the images. The Terms of Use says the images are protected by copyright. If you want to use any image found through picsearch, contact the webmaster or the copyright holder to get permission or it may be clearly stated on the Web site where you find the picture. This page also explains how you can prevent your pictures from being included in picsearch.

Family filters are in place at all times, so parents don't have to worry about kids turning off the filter. Help explains how to search and how to improve your results. Preferences allow you to change the interface language (nine choices) and whether or not you want the results to open in the same window or in a new window.

Advanced search options let you select whether you want only images, animation or both; color, black and white or both and the picture size. When doing a search, the results page suggests other relevant keywords to help you narrow down or broaden your results. The thumbnail page displays the image size, source and info. Source takes you to the page where the image is located and Info provides the file size, image size, colors, URL and shows the page where it lives beneath the information. A nice search tool.

Ask.com Picture Search
http://pictures.ask.com/

Ask.com Picture Search is a picture search engine that finds images by the keywords you enter. Its advanced search tool lets you get more detailed about the results you want to get. The advanced search features words to include and exclude, location of the words, language, domain or site, geographical area and date modified. You can save the settings or restore the defaults.

Some results are provided by picsearch (next entry). The copyright disclaimer clearly states the images in the search results are protected by copyright and trademark laws. Whether or not you can use the pictures is based on the site where you find them. The site might have a terms of use or other copyright disclaimer. If not, the best bet is to contact the person or company behind the Web site.

Every image has two links: Info and Save. Info provides the file name, URL and the page where the image lives. Save puts the images in a "saved images" page so you can refer to them later. It's not for saving to your hard drive. Once you've saved images, click My Saved Results, which appears at the top of the thumbnails page. On the saved results page, click Edit to change the title, URL and description. Images can be saved in a new folder and you can add tags.

Each saved image has a check box. Click the box to check it and then you can move it to a folder, delete it, print it or email it. Saved images can be sorted by date or title. Very nice picture search engine, but remember the images in the search results may not be free for your use.

Yahoo! Image Search
http://images.search.yahoo.com/

Yahoo! Image Search is like Google's as it focuses on finding images only, which also includes clip art. It also has an Advanced Image Search tool so you can get more specific about what you want to receive in the results. Not only can you limit it to a specific domain, but also to top level domains such as .com only, .edu only and so on.

You can also manage your preferences for SafeSearch, languages, display and layout, subscriptions and multimedia. Subscriptions enables and disables searches on sites that have premium content like LexisNexis. If you're a member of a premium content site, review the list and select the ones to which you belong. Their images are most likely copyrighted.

Remember that the images appearing in the results may or may not be copyrighted. Once you find a picture of interest, review the site or contact someone to find out the terms of use. These image searches are worth noting because they can find hard to find images that are free. The site also lists Popular Image Searches so you can see what many people are looking for.

Google Image Search
http://images.google.com/

While Google is best known for its search engine, it also has a separate search engine for searching for only images. The advantage of using its image search is that your results contain only images instead of everything. The important thing to understand in using this search is that the images come from all over the Web and there's no guarantee they're free or otherwise. In fact, the chances are they're not free, but it's another way to find hard-to-find images.

Enter the keyword of the image you're trying to find. The fewer words, the better. After all, most images are named with one word. If you get too many results or not specific results, add another word. You can also filter your results to omit images from adult sites by going into preferences and changing the option under SafeSearch Filtering. Here you can change other options including search language and number of results.

To take your results another step further, try the Advance Image Search. Here you can select exact phrases, not related to words and from a specific Web site. You can also limit images to a specific size, a specific format and colors. Once you find a picture, check the site or contact the site's owner to find out about its license.

Design Packs
http://www.designpacks.com/

Design Packs provides high quality image collections for use in personal and commercial Web design projects. Each collection has 15 images sharing a common theme. According to the site, new collections are added on a monthly basis. The terms of use explain how you can use the photos. The FAQ offers more help on how you can use the images.

Many of the themes you find here are nature-related such as bark, stone, flowers, and liquids. Images are 800x600. Click on a catalog to view its thumbnails. If you'd like to grab an image, scroll down to find the download section. You can only download an entire collection rather than individual images. All files are zipped. The collection is small, but full of high quality images.

diwiesign studio stockphoto archive
http://www.diwiesign.com/index...

diwiesign studio stock photo archive is a personal collection with over 500 images on dirt or industrial themes. All images are royalty free for personal and non-commercial use. Review the FAQ before downloading and the disclaimer (on the left side of the page).

This distinctive collection most likely has images you won't find in any others. You can browse the collection's most popular images or watch the random slide slow. The site has a search box for searching outside collections.

Images cover a gamut of topics such as railway, old looking objects, wooden substances and rocky surfaces. I'm sure this collection has a few surprises that would be a find for you.

Source: MasterNewMedia
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.