Pretty Pictures?
Pretty Pictures? a reader asks…
Hi Chris, everything I see online these days is pictures and videos. Can I use photos I find online when I post status updates on Facebook?
Take a little care here, copyright issues can easily trip you up. Your best bet is to avoid the Google image search to find pictures you can use, and look for them at specific sites online. Here’s a short list of places you can go to find free images that you can use:
Here are some sites that have free photos you can use. Before you use an image, check the terms of use the website gives – you may or may not have to provide ‘attribution’.
- http://www.stockvault.net/
- http://www.freeimages.com/
- https://unsplash.com/
- http://picjumbo.com/
- http://pixabay.com/
- http://www.gratisography.com/
Here are some sites that have free graphics and clipart you can use. Same thing applies, check their terms of use first:
- https://openclipart.org/
- http://www.clker.com/
- http://classroomclipart.com/
- http://www.vecteezy.com/
- http://www.free-stock-graphics.com/
Of course, since these are free resources you have to spend more time finding exactly the image that you want. If you don’t want to have to dig around and do the research, you can always pay for images. The commercial sites have better indexing and easier ways to find what you’re looking for. Here’s the three sites we use for commercial stock imagery:
Even with these commercial stock photo firms, you need to read and understand the terms of use.
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