Finding inexpensive, high-quality alternatives for stock photography
Everyone loves a great photo and every project deserves the best. However, finding the right snapshot for the right price can be tricky. Stock photography, while beautiful, can also be pricey, ranging from a few dollars to hundreds of dollars. Moreover, blindly using photos from the Internet can infringe on an artist’s copyright and fair use. Image sharing is a tricky business but there are legal alternatives to obtain high-quality pictures.
Creative Commons & Licenses
The easiest way to ensure that a commercial designer has the legal right to use a photo is stock photography – a professional photograph that can be licensed where the photographer or the distributor (i.e., Shutterstock) retains ownership of the image. The problem with stock photography is that it can be costly for non-profits and freelance designers.
The best alternatives to stock photography are using images with a creative commons license, or those that belong in the public domain and are free of attribution. Founded in 2001, Creative Commons (CC) is a nonprofit organization that enables the sharing and use of creativity and knowledge through a free, universal, standardized licensing system. Artists assign a license with specific conditions alongside their piece, indicating the public has legal permission to share and use their creative work in a specific way. While the six CC licenses highlighted in the table are not substitutions for copyright, they do grant artists the freedom to add to the growing pool of digital content.
Google Image Search
Google can also be instrumental in the quest to a find a fantastic free photo. One option is to search for “high-quality, royalty-free photos,” which leads to hundreds of curated websites of photography such as, StockSnap.io, Unsplash, Picjumbo, morgueFile or Pexels. All these sites mostly provide public domain photography but a few do have CC-license restrictions.
In addition, using Google’s “Image Search” in conjunction with its advanced search tools, by either googling “advanced image search” and choosing preferred usage rights or, on the Image Search page, filtering the results by choosing search tools and selecting usage rights truncates the results, thereby minimizing the risk of choosing photos that are copyrighted. (This is also a great way to specify picture quality by selecting a size – an important consideration when a specific resolution is needed for a project).
Wikimedia Commons & Flickr
There are also large public photo depositories of which one can take advantage. Belonging to the Wikipedia family, Wikimedia Commons is a fantastic free source where its 31 million photos possess CC licenses. Flickr, the photo-sharing site owned by Yahoo, in 2015 alone had approximately 728 million public photos uploaded. The media on these sites can be filtered by license type, downloaded, and used according to their license. Be aware, however, that these pictures may be taken by expert and amateur alike. Nevertheless, what makes Flickr distinct is “The Commons” an area where public photography archives have been collected from around the world and various international institutions.
Wrap Up
Whether you are using a photo in a blog post, magazine article, book cover, etc., Creative Commons is an indispensable way to protect, share and search for the perfect inexpensive picture in the vast void of the Internet. As a rule, always make sure to read and understand the licensing requirements. If a license is not visible or the artist has not expressed how they wish to receive credit, assume that the image is protected by copyright. Likewise, be careful of using photos taken of models and trademarked work – without a release these could be illegal. It can be hard to know if you can legally modify or use an image for personal and commercial uses, but as of 2015 there were an estimated one billion CC-licensed works available online, so the photo you need is out there.
