Image & Video
Do you ever take images from ‘Google Images’ and use them on your blog or website? Well, there’s a reasonable chance you’re breaking the law. You need to be using images that you have permission to use.
If you want to know how to find the images using Google Image Search, then you can check out this article here.
More experienced website owners and bloggers already know that you can’t just take someone else’s images. I’ve put this list together to help bloggers find free images for use on their blogs. If you know any more, please let me know in the comments below!
Unsplash hosts thousands of user-submitted made available for free and under the Creative Commons Zero license. This means that you can copy, modify, distribute, and use the photos for free, including for commercial purposes, without asking permission from or providing attribution to the photographer or Unsplash (although you are encouraged to do this if you like). No need to sign-up either.
Since images of kittens are amongst the most popular things on the internet, I thought I’d see what Unsplash had to offer:
And, here is nice picture of Dingle found by searching for ‘Ireland’:
A wonderful free resource, with all pictures under the CC0 license. This means that you can use, edit and distribute the photos in any way, for personal or commercial use – without accreditation. This means that you don’t have to attribute the original source.
I did a search for ‘strength’, and found a photo of a guy doing handstands almost as good as I can do them:
In March 2014, Getty announced that they were allowing use of their images, provided they were embedded and for what they call ‘Non Commercial Use’. Embedded means you can’t right-click and save the image, and then upload it – you have to take the code that Getty provide. This gives them a link back to their site, and you get to use the image for free. Regarding the ‘Non Commercial Use’, Getty are terming ‘Commercial Use’ as advertising, promotions or merchandising. The good news is that you can use these images for blogs, even if you have Google Ads on them. If you want an image for promotion, then you have to buy it.
There are actually over 50 million images on Getty that you can use – which maybe means you can stop reading this list here – the range is HUGE! More information on embedding here.
Just for demonstration, here are some images I found:
Beyonce
Embed from Getty ImagesIreland Rugby
Embed from Getty ImagesTomato on a Stick
Embed from Getty ImagesSummary: There’s a wealth of images there that you can use.
You may have heard of Canva before, it’s a great image-editing and poster-making website. However most people don’t know that they have a huge library of free images that you can download and use for your website/social media/whatever.
Here’s an example, I found this when I searched for ‘model wearing skirt’ Win.
The strange thing about this resource is that they don’t clearly state the licensing – so here’s a link that explains you can use the free images under your choice of license (e.g. CC0).
For textured, seemless backgrounds, subtlepatterns.com is great. If you use any of the images, you must attribute – however you can modify for your own use.
For example:
At Albumarium, you can get images that are large enough to print small sizes. This site tends to have quirkier kinds of images, with an albums on Moon, Skateboards and Elephants. However they do have more generic albums like Cities, Love and Animals, and this might be the perfect site to get some really top-quality images. You don’t have to attribute, but, of course, that would be a nice thing to do!
This is one from their ‘Retro’ album:
Image credit:Albumarium.
And here’s one from their ‘Architecture’ album:
Image credit:Albumarium.
I’m adding in Pixabay, because I’m finding myself using it more and more this year. By now, it has some seriously good images. You don’t need to sign-up to download. Images are free of use and free from copyrights. You can use the images for commercial work, and edit them as you please.
Here I’ve done a search for ‘Chilli Con Carne’, this is just one image that came up:
And, here is one of the images from the search ‘Christmas Tree’:
The newest addition – Stocksnap.io
Here I’ve done a search for ‘jumping’, this is just one image that came up:
This here is an ad – it’s for a website called Fiverr, and if you make a purchase then I get a percentage:
