Royalty-Free Stock Images
The guys over at DigitalRelevance broke a great bit of news for content marketers and web developers the world over – free Getty Images! (I should say, I think it was Bloomberg that was first with the story but it was the DR post I saw first…)
Since it’s formation in 1995, Getty quickly grew to prominence through a succession of acquisitions in the digital stock and communications space. For as long as I can remember, no matter what I read – newspapers, magazines, online content – I was hard pressed to never see a reference or citation to Getty Images – irrespective of the content, be it sports or business.
Getting back to the point, it’s believed that Getty made the move as a sort of capitulation to the fact that their images were being used without their permission anyway. In addition to opening up their treasure trove of images they provide two ways for the images to be used: downloaded or embedded. It isn’t beyond the realms of possibility that providing the embed mechanism perhaps allows them to track the use of their images across the web.
Now, before you rush off to GettyImages.com and cherry pick your favourite stock imagery for your website, I’d like to provide you (or remind you of) a good old-fashioned alternative to finding royalty-free images:
Google Images.
Using Google To Find Royalty-Free Images
Google have long provided search access to royalty-free images. There are two ways of finding these:
Google Advanced Image Search or Image Search Tools.
Google Advanced Image Search
Advanced Image Search (http://www.google.com/advanced_image_search) allows you to narrow the focus and specificity of your image search over a range of filters including, for example, keywords, colour and hue, pixel size and image file […]