Making it pretty with Photographs

Photographs add balance to a page. When you’re adding a new page to your website, it can sometimes be quite boring if you just have plain text. The easiest way to make a site just that little bit nicer is to add a photograph. The problem is, because of copyright laws, you can’t just use any photos you find in Google images.

Yes, that’s correct, you can’t steal someone else’s property just because it’s easy to do online.

The quickest and easiest way to get great images is to use some of the image sharing sites such as Stock Xchange. These sites make images available to you for free to be used in any place you like, you just have to check the license on the photo. Flickr for example, has a range of different licenses available for the photos that people upload and you can see those at Flickr Licencing.  It’s worth noting that as long as you play by the rules, you have almost unlimited access to a massive range of photographs from all around the world.

Commercial Photographs

If you choose to use images for commercial purposes you may want to own the rights for using those images and a great place to buy images is istockphoto.com. You can buy all different size images but for the web, you really only need a small image in most cases. If you buy the full size photograph not only will cost you a lot more to license but you’re only going to have to resize it to make it work online anyway as the file size is huge. With istockphoto you buy a number of credits and depending on what you want to buy you pay a certain amount of credits per photograph.

Photographs & Clipart

Another alternative that I like to use is a membership to clipart.com. This gives me unlimited use of all of the images in their site including photographs, clipart, cartoons and more for a year at a time. They remind me when the time is over and I can renew my membership. This makes life so much easier as I don’t have to worry about the licensing and I know how much it will cost me up front to the year.

So I hope this helps you to find images to illustrate your point of view or your products without having to rush out with the camera and try to shoot photographs yourself.