If you have been doing digital marketing for any degree of time it is likely that you have heard of the dreaded Getty Images letters that many individuals and businesses have received. These letters often include a snap of some image that you may have used on your site without realizing that it had been licensed by Getty at some time or another. While it is true that Getty has been known for extremely questionable tactics regarding this issue, who really has
time to even deal with this sort of drama? That being said it is best to avoid the issue altogether.
Using high quality images for posting is a must whether you are shooting out something to Twitter, Facebook, or other such social network or whether you are posting content to your website. These images can help draw people in so that they will be more likely to read your content. So, how do you come up with such images without incurring the wrath of Getty or without having to break the bank through a subscription to one of the many image servers out there like 123rf, iStock Photo, or their ilk?
Believe it or not there are some outstanding resources available, and with just a little search based elbow grease you can find them. Here are just a couple to help whet your appetite.
Photo Pin is a wiz at finding just the right photos. Using the Flickr API, it searches through millions of Creative Commons licensed pics offering you plenty to choose from based on your search terms. Having tried this service, we found that it certainly offers quite a variety of pics from which to choose. The one drawback we found is that many Shutterstock images also popped up. These require paying for a license rather than being able to simply add an attribution link. As long as you keep this in mind and avoid these pay to play images you will be okay.
This has to be one of the more interesting methods for defeating your reliance on stock photos. When you land on the Death to the Stock Photo website you are prompted to sign up. For your doing so you will receive a packages of various images each and every month. You can use these images however you want making this an extremely attractive option. The one drawback? You get the images they send. This means no specific image searches for a little variation.
Keep in mind that in addition to these two options you also have the ability to search places like Wikimedia Commons for images that might be used. One word of caution here though – unless you are skilled at knowing how CC licensing works and are quite mindful of your use of attributions it can be easy to find yourself in violation. That being said, please make sure you take care when pulling images from sources such as this.
Having outstanding images that help to convey your written messages is a must. Don’t let your content suffer from a lack of such.
