Finding Free Online Images for Web Use
In today’s web, a good site needs imagery; design, colors, and yes, even photos. Finding them (for free) on the internet for re-use can be difficult, if not downright dangerous. Here, I’ll give you a tip or two on doing just that.
A week or so ago I received a letter from Getty Images‘ Legal Department, claiming my unauthorized use of a licensed image here on my site. (YIKES!!!)
Reading further into the documentation, I realized that they had made a mistake, and a phone call later it was cleared up. However, the mental panic of being targeted for $1000 before it was solved was a bit unnerving. Let’s make sure that doesn’t happen to you.
Firstly, as you should already know, you can’t just grab any image off the net and use it. There are copyrights and licenses in place to protect the photographer, artist, designer, etc. If you do, and you get caught, running won’t help you.
Unless you’re a super-search master, Google Image Search won’t do it; it allows filter by size…Not by licensing.
So what to do? Well here are few tips for finding free online images for your web use:
- Flickr
One of the cool things about Flickr, is that it allows you to search and filter by Licensing. They even allow for uploads to be tagged with their Creative Commons licensing. - CompFight
A 3rd party interface into Flickr, this tool provides even more advanced search features. - Flickr Storm
A simple interface that not only pulls in flickr images relevant to your search, but it also pulls in what it believes to be related images as well. And of course, they have options for searching via licensing. - Xcavator
Although not “free”, this is a cool search interface that digs through various professional stock photo databases for you.
So that’s that in a nutshell. I hope you now have a launching pad to do some of your searching for design inspiration, images, etc. and never receive one of those letters!
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Thanks! Nice post.
on November 11th, 2008 at 4:01 pmGreat post! Just wanted to let you know you have a new subscriber- me!
on June 4th, 2009 at 12:56 pm