When creating online and offline material it's very important to add pictures. It's easy to find pictures through Google Image search. Unfortunately it's not legal to use most of these pictures for any purpose. You could instead opt to pay for royalty free pictures, but this costs money and it's even tedious to sign up and deal it.
Some good websites with free pictures
- http://unsplash.com/
- http://pixabay.com/
- http://www.pexels.com/
- http://publicdomainarchive.com/
- http://gratisography.com/
- https://pikwizard.com
My own attempt
Instead it's good to pay attention to licensing and copyrights. So there are good alternatives, both free as in freedom as in moneyless. freepictures.cc is a website I've created to help you find free pictures that you can modify and use for commercial purposes.
It's only a first version but it's already working wonders for the many websites I'm building. I can simply add a keyword and freepictures.cc will show me a bunch of pictures from Wikimedia Commons and Flickr that are either under a Creative Commons license that allows commercial use and modification or even simply public domain.
How to use the images
There are two basic cases:
Public domain
You can do anything, you don't have to do anything.
CC-BY, (c) KevinLallier
Creative Commons Attribution (BY clause)
Note that this case includes the CC-BY-SA license.
Once you start using the image you should give attribution. This means you have some options:
- include a reference to the page where you found the image, this is good for printed materials such as books or flyers
- include a link to the page from the webpage where you are using the image
- include a link to the creator's website from the webpage were you are using the image, this is by far the preferred option (especially for the creator) but it can be hard to find out if the creator has a website and what it is.
Other sources for free images include:
