How To Find Free Pictures On The Internet

bythemrj

469 followers

10 years ago

I wanted to write this blog to share with other members a trick I picked that has helped me a lot when looking for pictures for my site.

In lesson 5 of the Level 2 Certification Courses, Kyle explains different ways of acquiring reusable photos for your websites. These included:

• Your own personal camera
• Screenshots that you take
• Wikimedia.org
• Sxc.hu
• Amazon Associates (product images)
• Paid photos (that you buy via sites like Fotolia.com)

Due to my niche, it was difficult for me to take my own photos of the things I was talking about in my articles. Short of having a model to act out all sorts of different situations, it just wasn't going to happen.

So I mainly stuck to Wikimedia.org and Sxc.hu. Even though I found the selection of relevant photos there to be rather lack luster, I still made do. All the while I always thought, wouldn't it be nice if I could just use pictures from Google Images?

Well, you still shouldn't use just any picture you find on Google Images, but this may just be the next best thing.

I learned that there are options and filters you can set when you're searching in Google Images. If you click on the 'Search Tools' button, a small menu will appear. Click on 'Usage rights' and a drop down menu will appear, from there select 'Labeled for reuse'.

This will generate a page full of photos that you can use for your websites.

I'm not sure what the nuances are between all the other options like

• Labeled for reuse with modification
• Labeled for noncommercial reuse with modifications
• Labeled for noncommercial reuse

For the purposes of what we do here at WA, does anybody know which of these options we can/can't use to get photos for our sites?

There are some other very neat filters you can apply. You can search for pictures of only a particular color or size, you can set it to search for only photos containing faces, or only animations, etc.

You'll find that setting the filter to 'Labeled for reuse' will drastically reduce the selection of good quality photos, but there's still some good stuff to be found, and at least it's all in one place. No need to jump back and forth between Wikimedia and Sxc.

One last tip, trying changing up your search term if at first you don't find what you're looking for. Think of different words of phrases that could potentially be used to describe the kind of picture you're looking for.

That's now my go to way of finding pictures that I'm unable to take myself. I hope this will be helpful to some of you!

Cheers,

Jason