They say a picture paints a thousand words, but on the internet it’s more likely that a thousand words needs a picture. Mixing different types of content and media together is a superb way of brightening up written content, no matter how interesting or uninteresting it might be. A stock photo, either from a creative common site or made from a photo editor, can really maximise the quality of your content.
Sometimes pictures and photos will naturally come to you, being able to easily find an image and place it into your own work is great. Providing you get the correct permission, there are a lot of free stock photos and pictures you can easily add that will really improve those articles, lists and long form content you’ve got ready to publish.
We’ve spoken about how great we think long form content is, and how helpful content curation can be when looking at brand publishing. Getting the right images is just another part of this. It’s a lot easier said than done though, choosing a perfect picture can make or break a piece of content. A poorly chosen picture can make a website seem unprofessional or even worse, like content farming.
Quality content is invaluable, likewise being able to find and design the best possible images is too. Not all companies or designers have the budget to purchase the high costs of the adobe creative suite, or pay for each image they use. Fortunately, there are a number of websites and tools online to help out a content creator in need.
Here at Neil Walker Digital Group, we’ve made a list of some of the best sites for free stock photos and pictures, and also some great places where you can pay for premium content. We’ve had a look at places for great value and quality graphic design, and some more affordable options to more expensive design software.
Photography and Pictures
A great photograph is an excellent way of sprucing up some content. Be it a product description in need of a real illustration, something to set the scene, or for the deployment of a humorous caption as incracked. Photographs are pretty easy to find as they’re all over the internet, but, making sure it is of decent quality, and isn’t breaking any copyright laws, is another story. As nearly everyone can attest to, making sure you’ve got the correct approval can turn into a nightmare.
As a quick explanation of image copyright, there are normally two routes. The first requires some form of permission from the image owner, and the second is creative commons, which just requires you to mention where you got the image from. This, however, can add unneeded words to what wants to be a clean and efficient piece of content.
Don’t worry! We’ve chosen some fine websites which will offer you copyright free images, for free or a small fee:
Shutterstock
Here at Neil Walker Digital, we love the great images that shutterstock offer. They’re well shot professional pictures that come in a range of qualities and sizes. Whilst you have to pay for this services, it’s well worth it as you also get access to video footage and music depending the subscription you get. The best part is you won’t have to worry about captioning permissions.
Wellcome images
With many images offered for download for free, Wellcome images is an incredible resource of historical and contemporary biomedical and social history images. For a specific or unique picture that you’ll be hard pushed to find elsewhere, this is a great resource. Not all these pictures are free of creative commons, and you may have to pay for some.
New Old Stock
New Old Stock is a superb tumblr blog that offers some unique and fascinating photos from public archives. They are completely free of known copyright restrictions, meaning anything you find on there is free for use and of the need for any captioning.
With this really great range of photo databases already available, you have an excellent choice of images to choose from. However, if you are in need of more to select from, then it might help you out to go on an image search engine.
Image Search Engine
If you don’t immediately know what sort of image you’re after to add into your content, it can take hours to trawl through all the databases you know of to find the perfect picture. Fortunately, there are a number of search engines specifically for images. Google is a great resource, but these have an edge over it by guaranteeing freely usable images.
Wikimedia commons search
Wikimedia is an excellent resource for looking for images on creative commons that is constantly growing. At the time of writing, they currently have 22,294,271 pieces of media available that is being added to by contributors from across the world daily. This is a great place to look for stock images and videos of all sorts, but be wary that they are of varying sizes and quality.
Flickr Creative Commons search
Flickr is one of the best known photography websites around, so it’s no surprise that within their behemoth collection of images ranging from professional photographers to eager amateurs there is an awful lot of creative commons available images on their site. With an ability to search for specific copyright, you needn’t worry about having to find out where you stand with any of the photos you may wish to use.
Graphic Design
You’ve found images and pictures to put into a great piece of content, but what if you want an infographic? Or you’re trying to produce your own images and want some excellent font? Well, you’ll either need to hire an excellent skilled designer who can work around photoshop and all other creative software, or head online.
There are loads of websites dedicated to offering great graphics options – from free options to premium paid pieces of cutting edge design. Looking for some graphic add ons can take your images and content to the next level – making websites look even more professional. Here is a choice selection of some of our favourites graphics sites for when our excellent in house design team is busy.
Creative Market
With frequent exclusive free downloads, Creative Market offers excellent quality handmade fonts, templates, illustrations and logos for whatever your graphical needs may be. With premium content reasonably priced (and a lot of nifty bundles up for around $30, about £18) and a great variety of styles and types to choose from, creative market is a great place for pre-made bits of design that you can use editing your own images.
Graphic Burger
If you’re working on a shoestring budget but still want premium quality design, Graphic Burger is the place for you. Everything on their site is completely free and it gives a lot of premium design templates, icons and fonts a run for their money. There are loads of great features, including designed mock ups – where you can look at packaging and logo design before sending it off.
The most recent one is a very fancy 3D wall logo where you can test out how your company’s logo will look hung up on the office wall. It’s not just for commercial use that these downloads are useful though, and it offers something for every designer in need.
Helpful Tools
With so many images and graphic options available, it might be getting clear that choosing pictures for your content can be a time consuming and demanding exercise. With these tools, you’ll be able to help edit and review potential pictures, graphics and images before you upload them online.
If you’re using a chromebook, you may not have access to the creative suites such as adobe and may feel stranded. Here, we’ve collected together a few alternate programs to let you carry on the creativity, or just find a slightly cheaper option.
Pixlr
Pixlr is a online photo editor, that is essentially a browser based photoshop. Whilst it doesn’t boast the complete functionality of photoshop, it’s great for quickly touching up, resizing and editing any photos you may have taken yourself, or that just need a little bit of digital TLC.
GIMP
GIMP is possibly one of the most useful open source programmes ever made. The GNU Image Manipulation Program is completely free of charge, and open source, meaning that developers have free reign on improving and developing the software. It offers a very similar service to what the the Adobe programs do and offers the benefit of adding extra plug-ins as and when you need/want them. For a company struggling to shell out for the ever increasing costs of adobe and other editing software, GIMP may be the solution for you.
Picking the right photos and pictures for your content is no easy feat. With searching, editing and making sure not to break copyright, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by what previously seemed such a simple task.
We hope that we’ve helped point you in the right direction to finding the perfect picture to place in your content, and helped with finding a photo editor and maybe explained creative commons a little bit.
Do you have any websites you use for pictures? How do you find pictures work with your content? Join the conversation on twitter @theukseo.
