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How To Procure Free And Low Cost Stock Images

So let's talk a little bit about images 'cause we are going to work into postcards. So, I actually have a little sample here of a postcard. And obviously there's not a lot on it. We're gonna talk about what goes into a postcard. So we are actually gonna talk about printing them and mailing them, just like I just said. Nobody does that, but we do that. Obviously, for stuff like marketing information, we have to be able to mail that out. So yeah, so it's just a postcard. It's just two-sided. And we're gonna look at that this is very much image based. So, I mean, that's exactly what we want in a postcard or a quick marketing material. We want it to be able to get their attention. Obviously, the picture needs to get their attention and sometimes I recommend, depending, this one I kinda like just real basic and clean like it is, but I often recommend putting your contact information, one way of contacting you, whether it's phone is what you want or if you want them to email you or look at y...

our website. But putting it on both sides, and my feeling is always that no matter what side it falls down on the way back from the mailbox, your name or information will land right side up. So for me that's always what I think about. But I kinda like that this is crisp and clear and I think having a website would maybe just get too much in the way. So we're gonna look at that. But how do we get those images that are there? Maybe I'm a dog walker and I'm doing pet sitting services, but my photography is not up to pare and all the pictures of cats and dogs are these blurs. Does everybody have those? That's what most of my photos look like of anybody's pets. So I need to go get some images and I need to have some professional looking images. So where do we get those? We go out to the web, right? We go out to Google Images and we just grab whatever we want off the web, right? No, don't do that. I get asked that all the time and that's not what we wanna do. So I'm gonna talk about a few places. Since we're not designers, I'm a designer, but you guys aren't yet. I'm just trying to start this pet sitting service, I am not gonna spend $80 on an image of a dog. But I want a cute dog, so I gotta have that. So where do I go? I've got some free and some low cost places to look for those. So one of the first ones, freeimages.com. Freeimages.dot, it basically says everything you need right there. Some of 'em though, you notice there's premium as well and that's what happens a lot of times when we look in these services that say free. They will bring up free ones and they'll say, oh we don't have any free ones. Here's some free files. And they're decent, but I probably could have taken this dog picture. You know, they're not great. They're not as professional. Now I can go over here and go oh look we should at these by iStock, which we're gonna get to in a minute as well. But yeah, we're gonna get the lot more professional photos that are here. Oh look, more paw prints. (laughing) Oh, who wouldn't want this picture of the dog, right? Okay, everybody's ooing and awing. Okay, oh I'm sorry we're getting distracted by puppy pictures. Okay, that's alright. So anyway, that's what the free ones. The nice thing is, you do have some free options, but you will definitely see a quality difference. That one's not bad. That one's cute. But it automatically says, oh and then there's these premium ones as well. So just keep that in mind. And again, if you're a business you gotta spend the money to make the money. But sometimes you're just like, I just want a cute dog picture, is that worth $80 or $ or whatever it is we have to pay for that. Let's go to this next one. Some other free places that I have to choose from. Creative Commons. Is anybody familiar with Creative Commons license? We'll talk about license very briefly. Just know that you are using this. If we're making this postcard for our business, that is a commercial purpose. I don't know why some people can't figure out that that's commercial. Will there be money changing hands at some point for this endeavor? Yes, there will be because I'm going to not do this. Out of the love of dogs I'm going to do it because I need the money. Alright, so I need to find images that allow me to use them for commercial purposes. So let's do that. So I'm gonna come over here and this is Creative Commons, so it's basically searching images across different websites based on the license that's there. Now, everything, even this tells you everything. My thing is always if you find something and you found it this way, it says oh it's free to use. Make sure that when you actually find the image that you want, you double check the license and make sure that is still the license that's there. When I'm looking for something like this, it's search.creativecommons.org. And I'm gonna come in here and we'll actually type dog and I want something that I can use for commercial purposes and usually to modify, adapt or build upon, even if I'm not sure I'm going to do that. I just would hate to find something I like, that I didn't check that, then I start making changes to it and then I realize, oh I need that license and they don't allow it. But I really like that dog. So just check it so it's there right away. And the cool thing is, is it's gonna check images based on the licenses that's available. Let's actually go out to Google Images and check that. So I'll say Google Images, dog. I guess it's thinking and there we go. Now again, because it's Google Images, Google Images is checking so many places. I try to keep things like Flickr. Flickr seems to be a pretty easy way to keep track of the license. So let's actually choose Flickr instead. Here's Flickr, let's choose that and we'll see the items that come up from here. Let's choose, oh my gosh, this guy. He's like yeah. I wanna be on your postcard, that's what he says. Alright, so let's scroll down here and this is what I look at down here is the licensing information. Some rights reserved. Let's check out that and this is all in pretty much plain English, which is nice. Attribution 2.0 generic, but it tells you right here what you can and can't do. I am free to share it, I can adapt it for any purpose, even commercially. That's important. And then it says things that you have an attribution, so you have to give them credit. And this is kind of hard sometimes when you do something like this. Do you wanna do that? Well the nice thing is you could always put it in very small type down below or also sometimes you can contact the person and say this is what I wanna use it for, can I either put it really small or would it be alright if I didn't put that on there, because you're talking to the person who actually owns the picture and it'll be like this is what it is and I'll send you a copy of it and then you have that to kind of say here's where my photo is being used and sometimes they might do that. Again, don't push it, but I've always asked that before when it'd be kind of awkward to have that. I don't want it on the front photo, but usually you can put it on the back side. But it says you can do pretty much anything else with it, so that's great. And I just like that portal because it lets me choose from all these different options that we have, Flickr and Google Images. We can mediate comments, which is actually the next one I was gonna go to is Wikimedia. So if you go to wikimedia.org, this is part of the Wikipedia ecosystem. So Wikimedia, when you put media in Wikipedia, it's generally either public domain or it's under Creative Commons' license. So we can do the same thing. We can look for the images here and find what we want. So I'll just grab the image of the day. And again, we scroll down and it tells you here is the licensing that's down here. We could look at what that is. When we click on it, it goes back to the same page 'cause it's where they describe what all the different licenses are and it tells you what you can and can't do with that. A couple other free places. I have the Army pulled up here just because it's the easiest one for me to navigate, but in the U.S., any government agencies, if the photo belongs to them, you are free to use that. They are not copyrightable images, so if you wanna use NASA images, you can use NASA images for that. If you wanna use, you know, like here we looked up helicopters recently and we found all sorts of pictures of helicopters or whatever we need and we can use that. Now you need to make sure, most of the ones that are in the, I just went to army.mil/photos and then this brings up the featured ones, but I can also do a search and it'll bring up all the images as well. But that way I can use that and like I say, it's not copyrightable. Make sure that when you go to all these pages, especially the government pages, make sure that you read the terms that are on there. Sometimes finding that page is a little difficult, but search around and find it and just make sure. And then some of the images will tell you, copyright somebody else. So if it says copyright, it means it belongs to somebody else entirely and they're using it on their site. Just 'cause it's on the site, doesn't mean they own it. Exactly, so you need to be careful with that. And I don't know how that works if you're not in the U.S. I don't know how that works at all. So it never really occurred to me until recently. Let's see, that's the Army's Flickr page. That's actually where it's gonna send you if you choose one from the Army's page. And this one I like. This is called POND5, which is a commercial company, but they have this public domain project. So these are images that are in the public domain. So let's see if we've got some old. They're basically probably gonna be old and in black and white when we look at that. But we do have some old pictures here. Look, there's an old puppy picture. That's what we need. We need German prisoners playing with puppies. Sorry, I didn't realize what it was. But yeah, so we can bring that up and again it's free. Oh it's an actual video. Look at that. Yeah, that's what we need. That's like yeah. (laughing) But POND5 has this public domain project so they're completely free and available for you because they have fallen out of copyright if they were ever copyright to begin with. And a couple other ones that have free options available that are paid services, things like, iStock Photo. So if you're familiar with iStock Photo at all. If you become a member, which is free, you have to log in and then we can look at free images of the week. So I'll scroll down to the bottom and it will show you what the free image files and the free sound files or video files are for the week. So you're basically stuck with whatever's there, but if you're a member, go there every week and download the free photo and then you'll just have this nice repository of images that you can use. So if you're looking for something specific, that's not gonna be good until you get a lot of 'em, but their pricing is not all that bad, it's subscription based or you can buy packages usually. And they change a lot. I haven't looked at the terms recently on iStock or on Fotolia, which is another one. I don't have that one pulled up because it actually is part of Adobe now, part of the Adobe Stock photos. So that's the other one. Stock.adobe.com is the Adobe Stock photos. Now, we're all working with InDesign today and so we assume we either have or considering getting the Creative Cloud. You'll have access to Stock photos through there. But even if you're not a Creative Cloud member you can use Adobe Stock 'cause you have to pay for it whether you're a member or not, so you're still paying for the images. But you need a free Adobe ID to log into that. Now, the great thing is, if you do have Creative Cloud and you do start using Adobe Stock, you can choose Stock from within InDesign and then put in placeholders till you decide you like it or if you're doing something for a client or something to decide if they like it, then when you decide you want it, then you can hit buy and it automatically updates it to the unwatermarked version, the high quality version for you to use. So it's nice that you can shop for your stock photography from within InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator. So that's another part where the Cloud really comes in handy.