How to Find Free Images and Make your Own
I promised I would publish a blog about finding free images for your content. There have been a handful of members who have tackled this issue and I'm just going to leave a little link and info I hope you guys find worthy of your time.
The free images
I came across this link a while back and it has some amazing links to download free images. Just a warning: make sure your computer has the horsepower to open these websites because they are heavy to load.
http://blog.campaignmaster.co.uk/2014/07/08/how-to-get-royalty-free-images-that-arent-rubbish/
The other alternative
Also I'd like to brush on a nice little way to make images yourself. I've used Photoshop in the past because I have it on my computer but many of us don't have this program installed. A way around this issue is to use your free Google apps like Google Drawings.
You want to set up your drawing canvas with enough width (I like to work with 600 pixels) and a short height ( I do 300-350). This let's me make sure that if I set an image as a featured image on a blog post, the image won't take the whole space and the visitor will see the title and content.
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B2Uzvis5-VekU3JXcERSS0pBQ0U/edit?usp=drivesdk
You can make almost anything that comes to your mind with simple tools and shapes. In my example (an email opt in banner for my website) I used images from my computer and uploaded them to Google Drawings. All you gotta do to your image is to re-size or build on top of it.
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B2Uzvis5-Vekb25yVTFyeWJWdWs/edit?usp=drivesdk
I like to keep things simple so no masterpieces here. Also, most of the finished images that you come up with will only be a couple of kilobytes in size and have great definition if they are more than 1k pixels in length.
This is of a huge plus since most background images are more than 1 MB in size compared to a tiny 50 kb on an average Google Drawings image.
If you guys have any questions let me know. I'll do my best to answer your questions.
Also leave some links where you've found free images so that the community can benefit from this post if they read it in the future.
Take care guys and thank you for reading
September 17 Update
I just found this resource from one of my favorite blogs on how to make your own images and infographics.
http://www.chrisducker.com/visualtools/
Also, I reccommend subscribing to his blog because he's got valuable information that we all could learn.
Recent Comments
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I used photoshop because the utility is superior and I didn't have to fetch an image on the Web I would just picture it and upload it. Just don't over complicate your designs and you'll be fine
Thank you for the suggestion Jen. I just felt like it wasn't really training even though I considered making a more extensive post but I just went easy haha.
Maybe next time I'll do a training on something more valuable like creating a child theme for your website. I bought coding books to dive into web design it's really interesting.
thanks for this. Here is another link to free images, some paid so be sure to read the info. pixabay.com and two free editors pixlr.com amd picmonkey.com have fun with them, they work great.
I use pixabay, but I still have to look somewhere else as Pixabay is so limited with nice images.
I've used pixlr before it's a really nice tool and app I have it on my phone. That's how I came up with my favicon idea for my website
Thank you for sharing Erma
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Thank you for this awesome information! :)