Where To Find Royalty Free Images

Posting articles at Life As A Human is one thing. Dressing them up with images is another thing entirely. While it’s easy enough to do an image search in Google or Yahoo, a great many of the images you will find have a copyright or a license attached to them.

Unless our authors provide us with pictures that they have taken, we always look for images that are either creative commons, or public domain and even if the license does not require that we provide attribution, we do so anyway. We want to give credit where credit is due. It’s the right thing to do.

I am often asked where to find free pictures. There are a number of different sites that we use to find images. All have their own distinct advantages. Over time, as you get to know them and how their user interface works, you can find suitable images quickly.

Here are some of the sites that we often use when looking for royalty free images.

Wikimedia Commons

Wikimedia Commons is quickly becoming one of my favorite sites to source great images. You can search by topic or you can just enter your search into the search box. Each and every image you will find has information about the image including the license and permissions details.

If you are browsing Commons for the first time, you may want to start with Featured pictures, Quality images or Valued images.

This is a featured picture on Wikimedia Commons and is considered one of the finest images.
It was awarded second place in Picture of the Year 2009.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons – Creative Commons

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Microsoft Images And Clip Art Collection

Another site we often use is the office.com image site. This site has many superb images, illustrations and some great clip art. Unlike creative commons and public domain images, the images here are: “owned either by Microsoft Corporation or by third parties who have granted Microsoft permission to use the content.”

According to Microsoft: “If you use Microsoft Office.com or the Microsoft Office Web Apps, you may have access to media images, clip art, animations, sounds, music, video clips, templates, and other forms of content (“media elements”) provided with the software available on Office.com or as part of a service associated with the software.” – reference point 17 on this page: Microsoft Service Agreement

This site has some filtering options in the left hand sidebar that lets you select for illustrations, photos, animations and sound as well as image sizes.

Here is a great example image from the Microsoft Office Collection.

Image Credit: Microsoft Images

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Wikipedia

Like Wikimedia Commons, every image has information about the image including the license and permissions details. Moreover, Wikipedia is a veritable gold mine of great information. Wikipedia also connects to Wikimedia Commons. Just be careful in there … it’s REALLY easy to get sidetracked!

Looking for The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci? Look no further.

Image Credit: Wikipedia Public Domain

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MorgueFile

A morgue file is a place to keep post production materials for use of reference, an inactive job file. This morgue file contains free high resolution digital stock photography for either corporate or public use. ~ MorgueFile

I was recently introduced to this excellent resource by one of our guest authors. Their license summary for each image is directly below the image. They state that ‘attribution is not required’. We do anyway. Like I said before, I feel it’s the right thing to do.

Here is an image that came up in a search for ‘sad’ at MorgueFile

Image Credit: By: grietgriet at MorgueFile

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Flickr

Clearly, Flickr has a huge and excellent inventory of images. Why do I place them so far down the list? One word. Licensing.

If you search at Flickr, there is a search drop down option that lets you select ‘The Commons’. Do a search for ‘bridge’ and then select The Commons.

You would think that the images would be under a creative commons license or public domain. In fact, many are, but many are not.

Case in point. “http://www.flickr.com/photos/14992506@N03/6935643624/“

This is a bridge found under a search for ‘bridge’ under The Commons. I cant show you the picture because … well …

So, be careful. Many of our well meaning authors send in images that they think are OK. Often, they are not. I ALWAYS check the Flickr images now. Here is another The Commons search example with the ‘license via Getty’ logo.

If you have lots of time on your hands, Flickr has some great photos. But, when a majority of the images I find (or receive) would violate a license, I tend to look  elsewhere. All of that said, this is not a reproach on the quality to be found at Flickr and I will continue to use it as a source.

Here’s a beauty of Rideau Falls, Ottawa, Ontario … in 1869!

Image Credit: Rideau Falls, Ottawa, ON, 1869 by Musee McCord Museum –  No Known Copyright Restrictions

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Google Image Search and Yahoo Image Search

Both of these are very similar in that they will bring up images that are linked to a page or a post at a website. Click on the image, and you go to that web site where more often than not, there is no attribution provided for the image. Both have filters you can use but the filter choices have changed a lot in recent months and are IMHO not all that useful.

BUT

Both are PROOF POSITIVE of the importance to your SEO to use the Title and Alternate Text fields when you upload your images. No one is going to search for dscg3232.jpg. If it’s a photo of a Labrador Retriever, give it that title. It also looks way better as a mouse over.

For example. Hover over the image above of Rideau Falls. It’s file name is ‘2918568397_beac7c5af8_o-550×385.jpg’. If I didn’t use the title field, that is what would show up in the hover and that is what Google would index. People might actually search for Rideau Fall. They won’t search for ‘2918568397_beac7c5af8_o-550×385.jpg’.

Consider this. Depending on the day, up to 30% of the search traffic at Life As A Human comes from image search. Why? Because at a minimum, we use proper image titles.

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Some Closing Thoughts

Irrespective of where you get your images, my advice is to ALWAYS give attribution at the end of your article or under the image including a link to the image source. It’s a bit of extra work but:

• It’s good netiquette (net etiquette)
• It gives credit where credit is due
• It builds links out from your site
• It’s the right thing to do (I think I may have mentioned that a few times already)
• It’s good karma!

I am sure there are many other sources for royalty free images out there in cyber space. If you know of some good ones, please leave us a comment with a link and share it with our readers.