Marketing - 10 great sites to download free pictures for marketers and designers
ArielAharoni.com
But before that, let's talk a bit about the importance of the images on the Internet today: We have always been told that a picture is worth a thousand words.
But in the era of social media, a good picture is worth a thousand likes, shares, and tweets.
Anyone involved in digital marketing should know that using quality visual content is critical to promoting their content, whether it's an article on a news site or a Facebook ad. In a network of messages, a good picture will attract people to read the title and click on the link.
In my article on building the perfect post, I cited studies that showed that images are the most viewed and shared content on social media. This is also the most popular form of content. All of this is clear, but from surfing the net, I saw that there are two important issues that still preoccupy many digital marketers with regard to images on the Internet:
1. Copyrights - Which images are allowed to use social media and blogs without breaking the law?
2. Quality sources of images - Where do you find beautiful images to download for free?
In this post I wanted to clarify and provide a clear and simple solution to these issues, to avoid unnecessary complications and save you a few hours that I have already invested in the search for great sites with pictures for free download 🙂
Anyone who already knows the copyright field on the web can skip right to the list of photo sites I've collected.
A brief and simple explanation of copyright in images:
Rule of thumb: An image that you did not copy, create, or buy, is assumed to be protected by copyright unless otherwise stated on the site. This protection allows the photographer/creator the exclusive right to use or edit the image. Therefore, a picture you find on Google is most likely copyrighted.
What does this mean in practice? Using such a picture for business purposes (e.g. creating an ad, using a Facebook business page, using a business website/blog) is a violation of the law and can result in legal action by the creator of the image.
You can see that a lot of people use images illegally on the net, but that does not make it all right.
If someone wants to find you, it will be very easy to see who the original picture is and to find your photo (even if edited) by its digital signature. Such claims are not common, but it is best to avoid them.
To bridge these problems, an organization called Creative Commons was born, through which artists and photographers can define a wide spectrum of types of licenses to protect their work. The common denominator of most licenses is that they require credit to the original creator.
There are more than 200 million images under Creative Commons licenses on the Internet, but more than 90% of users do not give the author the credit, so I will briefly present the main types of licenses and how to give credit:
Types of Licenses:
The following types of licenses are arranged from the least stringent to the most stringent. In any site containing Creative Commons images, you will find these icons:
The least restrictive license, which is not on the chart, is CC0, which will allow you to make commercial use of the image and edit it as you wish without having to give credit. While the most stringent license does not allow commercial use and does not allow editing of the picture at all. In any case, in any license that is not explicitly defined as CC0, you will need to give credit to the creator. That's how credit is given:
this work, by foter.com, is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0
A. The credit should be below the picture, but it can also be at the end of your content page.
B. Please note my example above, according to the dry law, you must specify the name of the work (if any), the name of the author, the name of the license and provide links to the original license and work and/or the author's site. You can go deeper into the form of giving credit on the Creative Commons website.
The full infographic on the use of Creative Commons can be found here.
Beyond Creative Commons licenses, sites and creators can specifically ask their site how they want to get credit, and some give free downloadable images altogether - that is, without copyright at all and no credit. Therefore it is always a good idea to review the rules of the site you are in. So far copyright. A bit oppressive, true, but necessary for those who want to keep the law.
Now that we've learned about copyright, we've found great images:
Another reason that prompted me to write this post is that lately, I have come across more and more tedious images that are repeated in ads and posts. I'm talking about pictures of people in suits doing banal, people picking up a phone, pictures of people typing on a keyboard, A financial chart climbs up. Many times people buy such images from stock sites after searching for general keywords like Business or Success.
The only problem with this is a lot of doing it. So not only has it become banal, it does not differentiate your business.
Do you not want to get involved with copyright? Best to pay for pics
At the end of this paragraph, you will find a large list of sites that contain lots of free images.
But we can not always find exactly the picture we wanted, especially if it's a vector or a cartoon.
In such a case there is nothing to do and the picture must be bought. The question of where?
There are a lot of sites where you can buy pictures.
Their decision not to buy in the meantime? Now I'll show you where to find beautiful and high-quality pictures, totally free.
It is important to note that there are a lot of sites with free images to download, but most of them are simply not good, because they contain little pictures or images that are not quality and old, I am sure you have already encountered such.
So I narrowed my list to the top 10 sites.
10 sites with pictures free download:
1. Flickr
Flickr is the world's largest repository of free images for download under the Creative Commons license. It's a social network where photographers and creators upload their own private photos. To search for free images under Creative Commons, you need to set this up in a search. Note the type of license required for each image, depending on the types I mentioned earlier.
2.0 this work by Gisela Giardino, is licensed under CC BY-SA
2. Freepik
Freepik is a large database of free downloadable images that require credit with a link to the site. I think this site is the best source for vector images and elements, which you can edit as desired.
Photo credit: Freepik
3. Gratisography
A great site with free pictures to download belongs to the photographer Ryan McGuire and contains excellent artistic pictures and very excellent resolution. This site has no copyright at all and the images are free for any use you wish.
4.Splitshire
A site with free, high-quality photos of an Italian photography studio, and no copyright here. The site contains a lot of high quality and artistic pictures and can be searched in categories such as food, technology, nature, flowers, weddings, etc. It is highly recommended.
5. Life Of Pix
A very impressive site of free downloadable images is stunningly beautiful, with no copyright at all. The pictures are very qualitative in different situations in life.
6. Pic Jumbo
A relatively large site with more than 600 thousand images for free download, without copyright at all. Which includes the possibility of searching by categories such as food, people, fashion, animals, architecture, etc.
7. IM FREE
A website that contains a large collection of free downloadable images of users from Flickr, which the site editor carefully selected for commercial purposes.
These are super quality images under Creative Commons licenses and therefore must be credited to the creator. You can search by category.
8. Unsplash
An artistic site that centers free downloadable images without the high-quality copyright of photographers from around the world. The site is updated in 10 new photos every 10 days. Cool concept and pics accordingly, worth catching up.
9. New Old Stock
This site has an interesting concept. Here you will find a collection of historical photos for free download without copyright, including images from landing on the moon, the first satellite launched into space, etc. Suitable for very specific projects but still cool.
10. PEXELS
Pixels is a free image search engine with a CC0 license (images for free use without copyright at all). His search engine pulls out images from multiple sites listed here and that's his big advantage.
What if I did not find a free image that suited me?
Although I've posted a large list of sites that contain lots of free images in this post,
Sometimes we can not find exactly the picture we wanted, especially if it's a vector or a cartoon.
In conclusion
As you have seen, there are enough completely free sources for very high-quality images. I think these sites are a boon to designers, bloggers and social media managers who do not have a big budget to buy pictures. In addition, most sites offer a more artistic and attractive alternative to the boring pictures that flood the web.
I highly recommend reviewing them for your next project, I'm sure you'll find something useful there.
Tell me which sources you use to find free images? If I miss a website, please write to me in the comments!
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