Google Image Search is not a Repository – Where to Find Rights Free Images
It’s not all business all the time. It’s mostly business around here at Hosting Nation but when you’ve been at it all day, sometimes you need to unwind with something light and funny.
The sites I browse when I’m kicking back and defragging range in theme and content though most of them are funny in one way or another. Humour comes from many sources for me, though lately I tend to hit emailsfromcrazypeople.com.
Normally the emails just make me laugh. Today, the laughter was accompanied by a lesson, the moral of which was “don’t steal people’s images”. To start things off, here’s a screencap of the email (source: emailsfromcrazypeople.com, original source: unknown)
There’s a moral to the story here, and the moral is that the images that are shown in a Google image search are not public domain any more than the webpages you would find in a regular search. When you click on an image, the note is displayed “Image may be subject to copyright” alongside the original source for the image. That means you can’t just take it and put it on your website. Well, you could I suppose, but you risk action from the image copyright holder and if you’re running a commercial website – possibly even financial action against you for damages.
On Hosting Nation, we pay for pretty much everything – or we use items in public domain. On my personal website, I use all images either with permission from the copyright holder, public domain images or images with various levels of creative commons licensing. I won’t get into what those licensing options mean, but I will make some suggestions for getting images for your site.
If you find something you like in Google images, contact the copyright holder via email and ask for permission to use the image on your site. Most webmasters are decent folk, and don’t mind sharing. Some will ask for a fee, attribution or some sort of reciprocation and, considering what rights free images cost, it’s a reasonable request.
Wikimedia Commons is a bountiful source of images, many of which are in the public domain, all of which are available for use so long as you provide the right attribution.
Crestock and iStock are both great sources for high quality images ranging from photographs to Photoshop files to vectors and animations.
deviantART is a meeting place for artists and designers where you can find a plethora of images, illustrations and source materials available for use (again, often with attribution of some sort).
Clip art. I would stay away from the “free clip art” sites, and even most of the paid ones. Most clip art isn’t very good (though you could probably find some treasures if you looked) and there are better sources for images available. Having said that, the Open Clip Art Library aims to create an archive of user contributed clip art that can be freely used. They currently have over 12,000 images in the public domain.
There are thousands of artists, photographers and illustrators trying to make a name for themselves by publishing their works online and making them freely available, you just have to do the leg work. In the end, it’s well worth the effort.