Stock images are a great way to populate your website with imagery, jazz up a blog post and can be used on your Facebook and Instagram profiles. Whilst images are something we often all need for our business, it can be extremely time consuming and expensive task to find images that are great quality as well as a true representation of our brand.Don't let this stop you though. There are a number of incredible FREE stock image sites that make it easy to source great quality, beautiful images to make your content and business stand out in the busy market place. Here are my three favourite sites for finding standout images to use for your business.
- Death to Stock Photo- A free monthly pack of 10 photos sent to your inbox. A variety of different images from different photographers. Great for objects, spaces, people and craft shots. Every month I download the pack and save it straight into a ‘stock images’ folder on my computer for when I need an image.
- Unsplash - A beautiful, easy to use website where you can browse 100’s of photos. Great for outdoor and scenery images and they have recently introduced a search bar to make it quicker to find what you're looking for. Once you’ve found an image you like, click the ‘download’ button on the bottom right of the image, it should open in a new webpage, right click the image and hit ‘save image’. This will ensure you get the high resolution version of the image.
- New Old Stock One of my recent favourites is a collection of old photos from government files that have been repurposed for quirky stock photos. All photos are available for personal and non-commercial use.
Tips for using stock photos:
- Don’t claim them as your own photos (obviously)
- Ensure your download the hi-res version of them otherwise it looks tacky
- Once you start using stock photos you will see a lot of other people are as well. Spend some time searching for the images that are right for your brand and be sure not to get lazy with rehashing the first thing you see over and over. It will devalue your content and will fail to grab your audiences attention.
- Use this tool to resize an image if it is to big for your website
- Don’t resell or redistribute the images
- If you’re unsure about how you can use these images please contact the sites directly.