How To Find The Best Free Images
Obtaining images and graphics for your website design projects can be a difficult challenge. Photos and graphics are expensive; many of us have found that to be true. If a person is familiar with larger design companies, he is also acquainted with the fact that employing a graphic designer or photographer is even more expensive that buying stock images. All of these statements being true, it is possible to find some nice images, photos and graphics for free.
Having begun a low budget project or site for a friend one will find that some decent free image files can be obtained. After some careful planning as to the theme and the mission and possible content of the website it is time to do a careful search on the Internet to obtain the images that will be needed. This article will survey a number of valuable sites from which to collect free images as we begin to design our new website. If a Google search is done for free stock images it will bring up 205,000,000 results. A similar search for free stock photos will bring up 112,000,000 results (finds as of today January 20, 2011). Now everyone will agree that it is not humanly possible to survey all of those sites. At the outset, I am working off of a couple of assumptions. I will survey sites, which reach the top two pages of Google since that is what we all do in everyday life. From a web designer's perspective I will add a couple of more reasons.
- The most conscientious businesses always do the necessary chore of SEO which helps them rise higher in the standings. I will reward hard work and diligence.
- A sort of natural selection will happen so that the best sites will naturally rise to the top.
For the course of this article I have investigated a number of sites from the top two pages of Google which offer Free Stock Images.
I find that the sample group naturally falls into one of 4 categories. I will present the sample sites under these categories and explain why they earned their spot within it.
Poor Sites: There are some Stock Image sites which don't really offer a very good product.
The sites that I classified as Poor all had a photo count of 6,000 or less and one Stock Image site had as few as 300 photos. A low count of photos is probably going to indicate a very limited number of different galleries. Most Web Designers can conceptualize a message in as many as three or four different ways. For this reason, we are going to be looking for a good deal of variety; a good number of galleries.
The quality of the Stock Images is also very important. Does the site offer only low resolution images or high resolution images only. It is possible that a graphics designer will want to cut parts from different images to blend them into a truly unique image or montage. In this case, the size of the image matters as much as the quality. One particular site that I viewed had several portraits of people with "red eye". That was a sure turn off. I am not a photographer but I have fixed red eye a few times and I don't understand why someone would want to advance his/her career by submitting photos with red eye to a Stock Image Site.
Out of the thirteen sites that I viewed from Google's top two pages, four of them would be rated "poor" by these guidelines. It would pointless to even seek to advise one here for surely as many designers as find themselves on sites like these will leave.
Portal Sites: Sites That Are Merely Search Portals for Dreamstime.com or some other professional Website.
Several of the sites I looked at were merely portals for a larger and more successful Stock Image site. You could search and browse through galleries but in the end, each photo you clicked on would lead you to Dreamstime.com. You would wind up poised to purchase a photo from Dreamstime. I ask you, what role did all of this play in my day other than getting me to, through no choice of mine, look at some advertisements that that guy placed on his site? If I wanted to go to Dreamstime, I would have gone to Dreamstime. That is five minutes of my life that I will never get back. If you are looking for good Free Stock Images my advice to you is to train your eye to recognize Portal sites and to stay away from them.
Annoying Sites: Sites that are thoroughly laced with gimmicky advertising tricks and practices
The Internet can be like a bad movie. It is not as funny as the 12 year olds in the next seats think that it is. You spend your time deliberating over whether to leave and do something more fun at home, like sorting your sock drawer. A few of the Free Stock Image Sites that I surveyed brought back feelings that I had in the theater on those occasions. I don't like sites that use popups to catch your eye. One exception, in my opinion, are those Lightbox Popups with the gray overlay of the page. My favorite Web Development site, Sitepoint.com, uses one of these Lightbox Popups occasionally to present a product or book that I would truly be interested in. However, I found a whole class of Stock Photo site which overuses regular popups in an obnoxious way. One site gave you a popup every time you clicked to download an image. Most of these sights have poor design features such as navigation. It is common practice to use large block ads from Dreamstime which fool the seeker into clicking. When I search for photos I want to get the free image in question and not be redirected to Dreamstime.
The most annoying thing that caught my eye was the SitePal banner ad in the header. SitePal is the talking salesperson which inhabits some websites. I know that video is a very compelling feature of the Internet right now. Video can be used in a tasteful way to enhance sales but SitePal, probably not. I could go on and on about the joys and the grief of having to skate one's cursor around some instant JavaScript trap on the web page. In the interest of brevity I will merely say enough is enough. If you find a Free Stock Photo site that is gimmicky, silly or light weight, then move on. It is probably not build by people who are very serious about Photography or serving web designers.
Top Notch: The best Stock Image sites offer a large quantity of high quality photos and ease of use.
Everyone models himself after the winner. As I pointed out earlier, many of the smaller sites or affiliate ad sites were showing ads for Dreamstime Stock Images. They were doing this in more or less sly ways. Often it was difficult to know if you were clicking a link to an image in that site or on a link which would open up on Dreamstime. We know we have found the real thing, therefore, when everyone is emulating it.
Dreamstime has a huge number, ten million to date, of Photos and Graphics on its site and many are contributed by successful professional photographers. Dreamstime has Royalty Free images for purchase and for free. There is a wide range of categories of free photos and graphics for download at Dreamstime. The license termed Royalty Free is used for many of the images. That means that I may use it in the production of my commercial website with no strings attached after I have obtained it. I have both downloaded free images and purchased images from Dreamstime and been very happy. The price on the paid versions (higher resolution by the way) is very reasonable; lower than several of the other commercial Stock Image sites I have tried.
The design and functionality of the Dreamstime site is top notch. Recently the home page has featured an interactive widget, of sorts, which displays images in the categories which I had searched the last time I was there. This sort of thing is not overwhelming, though, and there is no use of obtrusive or obnoxious advertising tactics on the site. When you find the free photos that you want you can add them to a great Lightbox and save for viewing when you are done. The Lightbox will keep your selections for months and perhaps years into the future. You will need to register for membership in order to download free images on Dreamstime. The company has never bothered me with any spam mail and they have kept tract of my member info in good form.
In my search of the top listings for Free Stock Images, four rated the Top designation. Stock.XCHNG was one of the other sites that I found very pleasing and seemed to have a good selection.
Here are some tips for spotting a good Stock Image site.
- Does the site look nice in a way that suggests that the owners are interested in advancing photography are just in advancing their own pocketbooks?
- Does the navigation, galleries and search work well?
- Is the site free of annoying and intrusive advertising that makes working there a pain?
- Do they have a vast number of photos and graphics to merit your time and energy?
- Do they host quality images, good work in focus and no red eye?
- Do they offer the Royalty Free designation or do you need to constantly link back to their site?
- Do they explain the different licenses in a way you can understand?
- Do they have nice features such as Light Box which make sorting through a large number of photos a pleasure?
- To they treat you ethically or do they spam you and "Rick Roll" you to other sites?
If you can answer yes to most of these then you have found a great Free Stock Image site.
- As a Freelance Web Designer I have an intense interest is making sure that my customers have a workable, quality site. I have 12 years experience and am skilled in Drupal CMS as well as several types of e-Commerce Shopping Carts.
But aside from all of this I have noticed an alarming trend in the business community. Are you one of the thousands of small business owners who would like to have a good quality website without paying a fortune for it. Many businesses believe they could access more customers if they could have a website reaching customers before they find another vendor in the area. Advertising through conventional avenues frankly costs too much. You have known people who have contracted with big city Design Firms only to get a site that is not effective or is down much of the time. As a Freelance Web Designer I can help you get a site.
Let's get a site going that you can not only appreciate but afford. If you have need of a new website or just the need to chat please feel free to visit me at: My Web Design Website Gregswebs Ottawa, IL
I also offer Quality Linux Hosting Services at: GW Hosting
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