Getting Free Images To Illustrate Your Articles With

Posted by Editing Staff

We encourage writers to include images, screen captures or other illustrative media with their articles whenever possible because our stats clearly show that articles with media get far more reader views and comments than articles without–which means authors using media are likely getting a lot more link clicks too.

So, I thought this would be a good time to mention a few places where you can find royalty free stock images to use. Some of you may be aware of some or all of these already, but I think it will be helpful for those who aren’t.

A little preface is in order however. Every site and often individual images from each site, has their own associated usage restrictions, or terms of use. You must read these carefully before using the image with your articles. If we get notification that an author breaks the terms of use and wrongly publishes media without the proper permissions or without crediting the source properly, our resolution process is to remove the article on the first offense, and ban the author on the second.

Important – one final word of warning, do not link directly to images on these stock photography sites. That violates their terms and ours. Any images you want to use should be uploaded to your own server or service, and linked to from there in your article.

With that out of the way though, there are thousands of images available at the following sites which can be used, following the owner’s and site’s terms, in your articles.

stock.xchng – this is one of our favorites for ease of use as well as the size of their collections. Be sure to read the site’s terms of use, as well as the individual terms for any image you use. The search feature here is really good for finding artistic and often professional quality images.

Free Digital Photos – this one is also a favorite because it has a growing collection of images, is well organized and easy to use.

Flickr – there are thousands and thousands of images on Flickr that have been offered under a CC (Creative Commons) license, meaning if you follow the guidelines of the CC license associated with an image, you can use it to illustrate your article. Flickr also has a special search feature just for finding images released under the CC license, so use that to speed up your searching.

MorgueFile – was looking very promising however had some technical failures recently and has been offline for about 2 weeks. According to the site’s Twitter account they are working on rebuilding the collection database and restoring the site as quickly as possible, so we’ve mentioned this as a source to watch going forward.

There are many more out there, but these are a few of our favorites that we wanted to give mention to for any authors seeking sources of quality, no-cost graphics to work with.

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  1. One Response to “Getting Free Images To Illustrate Your Articles With”

  2. By Sweton T Fleming on Sep 17, 2009 | Reply

    these are really great to have..it is great to see you..

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