Pictures are a big part of websites and blogs these days, but when you start out online and build your first website, one of the first challenges is how to get a free website picture for your posts, mainly to keep your expenses to a minimum. The trouble is that it is hard to find free images online that are not subject to copyright.
You do not want to search for images and just download them and add them to your posts because most of them will have copyright properties, and you would be effectively stealing those images, which could land you in hot water, so be careful.
Free Images Websites
There are loads of websites that state that their images are free, just do a search and there are plenty that will pop, in fact I just did a quick search and it returned 325,000,000 results, pick the bones out of that lot
What I found in the past when I visited some of these sites was that although they said they were free, they weren’t, and the search continued. Now there are some where you can find free images, but they do not offer their full selection, and the best images you will have to pay for, but with some patience you can find some pretty good free images within their free selections.
A few sites you may want to look at are: pixabay.com – public-domain-photos.com and morguefile.com Be sure to check the license agreements before using any pictures.
There are also those images that are free as long as you link back to the source, giving attribution for the image. Another place where you may find some free to use images is by using Googles advanced search and pick the appropriate usage rights, but be sure to double check the license agreement before you go ahead and use the image.
Pay For Your Images
If you have the budget to do so, then paying for your images obviously will give you peace of mind and exposure to some fantastic photos to use within your posts. It can get expensive when buying images, but there is plenty of choice.
Some examples of websites to buy images from are istockphoto.com – bigstockphoto.com or gettyimages.com to name just a few, but there are literally thousands to choose from and it will come down to price, quality and personal choice for most people.
Create Your Own Images
It is possible to actually create your own images and I am not talking about using a camera to take your own photos, although that is a great option. I often mean to take my small digital camera out with me to snap some pics, but more often than not I forget, unless I am on vacation of course.
At least if you take your own photos, then you know they are yours, just be careful what you are taking photos of because there are legalities of using certain photos even if you did take the picture. I am no legal buff and do not give any legal advise here, so do make sure you investigate before using a photo you took.
It can be a minefield when it comes to images online, so I want to share a simple way of creating images that are safe to use. They are only simple images, but they do the job and can look great especially if you are one of those creative types
Above to the right is an image I just created using the method I am going to share with you, like I said simple, but effective and it only took about two minutes. So how did I do it?
Just by using Cooltext.com and Xheader it is very easy to make some great images to use on your websites, and it will not cost you a penny, just a little amount of time. So get started and have fun creating your own unique images.