Finding Website Pictures

One of the biggest tasks for web design is finding pictures for websites. It can be very challenging because it’s not like you can just go on the web and grab any old picture off of any website and use it as your own.

There are copyright laws that prevent this and you can find yourself in a lawsuit if you don’t respect those laws. Of course it’s crucial to find the right pictures to go with your website, and we all like to be able to take our own pictures when possible.

Of course this is not always possible and sometimes we have to default to finding images from stock resources. Assembled in this blog post are a couple different places that I find pictures online that are available to use for free.

One of my favorite places to look is on Google Images, but you can’t just look in the general image area because most of those are copyrighted. The way to find the free to use images is to go to Google Images and then click on the Tools button in the upper bar.

Then click on the Usage Rights tab. From the drop-down list choose Labeled for Reuse. All of these images have been put out as fair use without copyrights and are free to use on your website.

Another great place I like to look for high-quality images is called pexels.com. This website has images taken by actual photographers and are very high quality and high resolution. Now, their selection is somewhat limited, but usually you can find something good on this site.

A new contender in the free photography space is Pikwizard. They have over 100,000 free images and videos on the site, with 20,000 of those exclusive to the site. They are also adding new images and videos to the library daily and their ultimate goal is to get to more than 1 million images and videos.

They’ve got A LOT of pictures of people, which tend to be rare on free stock photo sites. If you check out the site and search for “office” or “meeting”, you will see the quality of images on the website. All of which are free to use without attribution. You can also take each image and edit it on their graphic design tool, Design Wizard!

One final place to look for stock images is stockphotos.com, they have an article similar to mine that is helpful: 32 Best Sites for Free Stock Photos – The Secret List!

If none of these options work, there is always photography image subscription websites that are available. On these you can pay around $25 a month and get 5 or so images downloaded. That’s about the average cost of image subscription sites.

You can pay a lot more than that depending on what type of images you want. But for generic stock photos for a website, that’s about the going rate.

We also have some images of Billings and other places around Montana on our website. Go to our website resource and photography landing page here.