Homestead Blog

Here’s our creative guru Ron again with the second part of his series on tips for choosing good imagery for your site – Rochelle.

A few posts ago I gave you some tips for picking good photos from the Homestead Image Library. Those tips also work well for other online sources of photographs and illustrations. But beware: unlike the free images you can find in the Homestead library, most other images available on the net are protected by copyright, so your use of them on your site will be legally restricted.

If you’re willing to pay a little, you can search for images on the many stock photo sites available. Make sure that you are searching for royalty-free images, and pay attention to the usage license that you are accepting. Some sites have web resolution imagery they’ll let you use for as little as a few bucks!

These sites have pretty sophisticated search engines and you can really narrow your search to find just what you want. Here’s a trick I use a lot: if I find a photo that I like, I’ll search for other images by the same photographer to see if there are other good ones I can use!

Other fruitful sources of good imagery are sites that bring you a selection of free images with creative commons licenses. These can usually be used if you give credit to the photographer on your site.

I’ll close off this post by emphasizing one very important thing: the key to using images you find on other online galleries is to make certain it is OK to put them on your site, and to follow all guidelines associated with using the pictures. That’s a simple matter, really, so go on and have fun searching!

Coming up in part 3: Taking your own photos