Facebook (social sites) - I bet you never thought about it, but this is one of the best ways to get free photos. If you have around 200 friends you may have a gold mine of 10k photos from friends and such. They are probably not all photos of people either. Just ask if you can use their photo and most of the time they’ll say for what. After you explain it’s for a post they’ll say sure most of the time.
Freerangestock (free stock sites) - Many sites offer free commercial use photos. It’s up to you if you want to use them. They may not always be amazing, but many times you can find what you are looking for.
Friends (on the move) - Your going on a hike next week right? Mind snapping me a couple photos of nature? I mean they’ll usually say sure and do it for you. It’s so easy to text a couple of photos for someone. I wouldn’t be too picky on the photos just sometimes it can pay off well.
Yourself (camera) - You don’t need to go and just take a photo. I snap 100s of random photos in a day on my blackberry. The picture quality is almost HD with the blackberry 9700 and that means it’s good enough to use. You can also bring along a camera, but always carrying a camera can be a pain.
Gimp (creation) - gimp is a free software download that besides allows you to edit photos it allows you to create graphics for photos. You can create graphics to use as a photo. It could even be really simple as stick figures talking about a topic. Photos don’t have to be wonderful always just have to make a point.
Well all of them are good but for me having your own photo is the best. I always brought the camera along with me because if there’s a beautiful thing/animal etc i just take a snap on it and presto i have a photo.
I said if you asked your friend. Facebook does not own the copywrite of the images. The creator owns the copywrite of the image. Unless you can post where it says that any images uploaded to Facebook are owned by them I can agree, but most of the time Facebook isn’t going to charge you if you have the agreement of the creator of the image. I can not see how that is criminal because Facebook doesn’t own that image. The creator does.
Understand that the stock photo houses have very sophisticated image recognition software that spiders the web looking for unlicensed use of their copyrighted images. Instead of paying $1 to someplace like istockphoto, you can easily end up paying thousands to the stock photo houses in statutory damages under the US Copyright Act (at least if you are in the U.S.).
you CANNOT just go on Google and rip images - thats illegal.
If you dont not have permission from the original photographer/illustrator or permission via a payment eg buying a licence from iStock et al ~ then you can not use it commercially.
Permission comes in the form of ‘Hey guys, use this image wherever and whenever you want’ type statement etc.
Also royalty free DOES NOT mean FREE to use, it means you pay a one time license fee for use.
gah, disappoints me so much to hear people say that they just go on Google and use them 'cos they are free
You need to be careful with pictures no matter what every picture on the internet has a copyright … copywrite?
If it doesn’t say they are releasing the rights for commercial use then you can’t use it most of the time without the permission. I’m not telling you what to do this is just some advice, so I’d be really careful with Google.
The sarcasm was almost lots on me too, only after rereading I saw the little headshaking smiley. So it’s not strange Alex took your response serious. And people with little english skills might take it serious too
And make sure the link text is the same as the title of the post or page you stole the image from. That way the author might not sue you for copyright infringement.
It would really depend on how high your site/page ranks, or how popular it is. I mean I wouldn’t mind if Google decided to place one of my images and a link to my blog on their front page.
Yeah, the forum could use a sarcasm smiley for people who don’t understand English.
I guess this one might work, but really have we become so jaded on the language that we actually need smileys to communicate what we really mean?!
Someone should write a facial recognition/voice recognition script that interprets what we mean when we talk, and displays a face in the post with corresponding expressions so that even non-English speaking readers can at least correctly interpret what they’re reading whether they choose to respond in a manner that reflects that or not.
Now if you’ll all excuse me, I have a weekend to attend to.
Firstly, I was not trying to flame you, my comments were entirely justified as from what I read, it could VERY easily be interpreted that you meant what you said (nothing in what you said read sarcastically). You have to understand that people (quite often beginners) come to these forums looking for advice and reading comments which aren’t very well defined (like intended sarcasm which just comes across as personal opinion) may lead them to think copyright infringement is OK. You may have intended it to be sarcastic, but unfortunately it didn’t come across like that - and people are going to take what you said quite literally.
