Where to find free images for your blog posts?

I know that title would bring a frown on your face!

- It’s all over the internet Mani, what are Google images for?

Well, well i know i know! Let me explain.

In India, this is not a popular concept, but elsewhere it is. I’m talking about stock photography and royalty free images.
In the US, UK and rest of the world (excluding some countries like china,India etc) images can be used only with the photographer’s agreement.
Be it on online, editorial or any other use. There are stock photo agencies that buy the pictures from photographers and provide online stores for users to buy them.
As you buy the images, the photographers are given a percentage of the sale.
There are many affordable online stock photography agencies like istockphoto.com dreamstime.com that offer you images from as low as US $1.

But this is of no interest to us unless you want to spent a few bucks for every image on your posts. What we are interested is free royalty free images to use on every blog posts.Before we go into the sources to get free royalty free images, let’s see how this topic affect us bloggers?

Okay,so if you are in India or China or such countries where the licensed use of images, are not popular, you can manage to get free images from Google or Live image search.Fine.But what about others? Do you find images from google or ask for permission from the photographer/agency?

I think it’s fair to be asking the photographer permission to use it on your blog. you can very well reciprocate the favour by linking back to his site through a credit line.
Many a times, this results in email exchange delays and other bottle necks -hell you don’t post the article because you haven’t recieved the permission yet.

There is huge potential for stock photo agencies here - if there is a stock photo agency that will provide us bloggers with images from as low as US $1(squeeze it down even), then considering we have around 15.5 million blogs, imagine the revenue that could be generated from image use on blogs?

Darren says that he normally gets images sent to him by companies so finding images for new products is not a problem for him.I’m assuming that might be the case with Gizmodo or Techcrunch. But what about the rest of blogosphere?

Well, luckily we have a few options here -

1 - Stock Exchange.
These guys offer free royalty free images for any use. They have a pretty impressive collection of images as well. Good enough for a amateurs but not professionals.They have many smudged and brushed images also, so you may want to keep away from them but select the best ones.
They don’t want you to link back for credit or anything of that sort but from the number of backlinks they’ve got it’s clear that anyone who uses their image will link back to them.

2 - Morgue file.
The morguefile contains photographs freely contributed by many artists to be used in creative projects by visitors to the site. To acknowledge the artist’s accomplishments, we ask that you credit the photographer when possible. They have an impressive collection of images too.

3 - Indexstock
These guys have an impressive collection of images across many categories. they may not be hi-reosultion ones but fit enough to use on blogs.They are one of my personal favourites.

4 - Free large photos
This is a free images site that provides great collection of places and people photography. You have to link them back in order to use the image in your blog.

So, you have all these resources where from you can collect images of good quality for blogging purpose.The advantage you have over using Google images is that you know exactly whether the photographer/website need be credited or not and that you get good quality images.

And it is a good habit to credit the site where from you have used the image so that they know that you appreciate it. Also, asking the photographer as to whether you can use the image on your blog is also a good idea, and when it get’s frustrating you have all these free resources to try.
Images courtesy

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