A picture is worth a thousand words. It is common to use high quality images within your blog, customer newsletters or within your storefront. Research have shown content with images are more memorable and effective.
Now there are 2 ways you can get those images:
- Take your own pictures: using the best gear and skills possible
- Choose high-quality images from stock photos or gallery
Obviously taking your own picture is a time-consuming task that shouldn’t be your priority as a business owner. So the best option is finding platforms where you can find high quality images easily.
Where can you find those images online? Google may come to mind first. It’s true that you can simply Google for any images you want. The issue here is that most images you find online are copyrighted. Even though you could technically just use any images from Google, you may run into copyright issues which is becoming more serious in recent years. It wouldn’t be fun to receive letters from original authors demanding for compensation.
Without getting into the details of all the copyright license types, one important one to be familiar with is the Creative Commons (CC) license. This is the common form of license authors use to distribute their art work online and give other people the right to share, use and build upon their images. There are different types of CC licenses, some not allowing commercial usage, some allow it but requires attribution to the original work. Make sure you understand the license of any image before including in your blog or website!
Now the best form of license is the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license. This is the “no copy right” reserved form of license and put the images in the public domain, which means you can use it freely even for commercial purposes without any attribution.
Here are 5 platforms where you can not only find high quality stock images, but use them freely without any copy right issues.
Unsplash – Best place for CC0 images
Unsplash is a famous CC0 collection with completely free photos and the quality is fantastic! You can easily search for images by categories. After downloading the image, Unsplash will recommend related photos to you and you can find similar images at the same time! They release a new bundle of 10 photos every 10 days, and you can come back to Unsplash to find new ones.
Pixabay – find many types of CC0 images or videos
When you need other types of content, including photos, illustrations, vector graphics, film footage and music, Pixabay is the place to look at. You can download and use them for any purpose without any attribution!
Foodies Feed – The best free food photos for commercial use
If you sell sporty products, such as shoes, leggings, or swimsuit, you might write content related to teaching potential clients how to keep healthy! Then you can take a look on Foodies Feed which collects more than 1,500 foodies images that will never let you down. You can click “Popular Tags” to filter the hottest images!
pngimg – The largest FREE transparent PNG images clipart catalog
Pngimg is your first choice If you only want PNG format images to fit within your content. It collects more than 90,000 PNG images and sort images by alphabet. Also you can use keywords to search PNG images, and easy to download!
Stockvault – New photos, textures, and illustrations added every day
Stockvault is another great free stock images platform. Even though its inventory is only about half the size of Unsplash, it is well-curated and has many daily new additions. This site is also well-organized for browsing by category.
Use the above platforms to find high quality, license free images for your online shop, products, content and email marketing. Don’t forget to make sure to also choose Kiwi Sizing to build up size charts so that your brand content look more consistent!
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