Searching for free images to use with marketing materials

[Reyed Mia (Apprentice, DIU)]

Searching for free images to use with marketing materials

welcome to another episode of weekly marketing tips. I'm Brad Batesole, and this week I'd like to talk about a simple way to find free images to use in your marketing efforts. Whether you're blogging, creating an advertisement, or looking for something to jazz up a tweet, you've likely stumbled into the realm of debating whether it's worth it to pay for premium stock photography. Well, before you decide to take the plunge with paid stock, you might want to see if there's something that'll fit your needs for free. Google Images has a great search filter that often goes unnoticed, and it allows you to find images that are labeled for reuse and available for immediate and free download.

So to get started and to show you what I mean, I'm here at images.google.com, and this URL will take you directly to the Google image search. You could do a standard Google search and then click over to get into the images section. It will work either way, but I prefer to start from here. So let's say that I'm looking for a laptop computer, for example. I can type in laptop and then choose search, and you'll notice that Google's going to bring in all the images without any search filters applied yet. What we want to do is click at the top of the screen where it says Search tools.

Once I select this option, Google's going to bring in some filters that are specific to the category, Images, that we've selected here at the top of the screen. From here, you'll notice a dropdown labeled Usage rights. When I select the dropdown on Usage rights, you have some options: Labeled for reuse with modification, Labeled for reuse, Labeled for noncommercial reuse with modification, and Labeled for noncommercial reuse. And these labels are fairly self-explanatory. Labeled for reuse with modification implies that you'll be able to modify the image however you'd like.

Labeled for reuse means Google's not sure if you're allowed to make modifications, but you might be able to, and, of course, the non-commercial sections mean that you won't be able to use those in commercial efforts. So I'm going to tap Labeled for reuse, and Google's now going to filter out all of the images that match that label. Now, I should point out that Google's going to do the best it can to understand the license, but you're still going to need to verify that the license as it's tagged is legitimate, so you'll want to review the site that you're pulling the image from just to be certain that you do indeed have the right to the image that you found.

Now, a lot of times you'll find that this search will bring you to other sites that have great resources for some of these free images. So I notice this image stands out to me here on the right-hand side of the screen. It's a laptop on a desk, and I'll select it to bring in a larger view. Now Google's going to give you an option to either visit the page or view the image. In some situations, when you tap View image, Google's going to take you directly to the image source itself, and this can be a challenge in this situation because we don't have any context about the usage rights.

We can only sort of infer that Google said that it's okay, but I really like to be sure. So I'm going to choose the back arrow, and in this case I'm going to choose Visit page. Now, in some situations, it's going to just take you to the page that that result is on, and you're going to have to dig around to find it. In this case, it took us to pexels.com, and if I scroll around, I can see lots of images, and now I found the image that we saw earlier. So I'll select it to expand it, and here at this site I can see the licensing information here on the right-hand side.

It's showing me the source that this image is coming from, and it's also informing me of the license, so now I can select the image and go ahead and download it because I'm aware that it's now free for personal and commercial use and that I don't need any attribution. You'll find that some of these images will require attribution, and that's why it's important to double-check the source. Now I'm going to go back to our search results, and if I scroll up in the page, I notice perhaps this image, and I'll select it, and in this case I'll choose View image as we saw before, but because this website has a different redirect policy, it actually takes me to the page with the licensing information.

And here I have some options, and I can review the license, and I can also tap FAQ on this particular site to learn more about those licenses. Now, every site that you discover is going to be set up a little different, so you're going to need to do your own due diligence to determine whether or not that image is actually available for use in the way that you intend to use it. But this is a great starting point and also another great way to discover other resources with free stock photography as well. Thanks for checking in this week. As always, I'd love to hear from you, so let me know what you thought about this week's episode.

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