Best Websites for Downloading Royalty Free, High Resolution Images for Online Writing
High Resolution Images: an absolute necessity!
Inspired by a hubber's question in the forums and a continuous need for finding high quality photographs or images to illustrate my hubs, I began researching the websites which offer royalty free, high resolution images. In this hub I am sharing the findings of my research and hope that will answer the quest for good theme-based pictures of many who are on a constant lookout for good quality legal images.
All this while, I have used Google images which of course is a great resource of various categories of high quality images. However, the fear of flouting copyright rules remain and none of us would like to get into legal trouble only because we wanted to supplement our written content with some good relevant photographs. Hence with Google images, we need to check whether the photos taken are copyrighted or not and do the needful like acknowledge the author or the website when we use it in another place.
I would like to be even more carefree while selecting photographs for my writing, hence my search for the best websites from where you can download copyright free, high resolution images began. Here are some very good places where you can get your images from.
1. Freepixels.com:
Presently they have a stock of 4,348 images in 40 different categories, spreading over a wide range of collection and allow free downloads for commercial and non-commercial purposes.
However, as I read their terms and conditions, they do expect acknowledgement of their domain name "freepixels.com" whenever using their images. That will eliminate any kind of hidden legal trouble. For e.g. if the images are of any art work, then it most probably will be copyrighted by the artist. Also, it's always a good practice to acknowledge the source unless it's completely original.
- The images are of high quality and in jpeg format which is compatible in most places, whether online or print.
- No registration required, no login account required where you need to remember the password.
- Easy to navigate and download
- However, the stock of photos may not be exhaustive as of now
2. Freefoto.com
Freefoto.com is an excellent stop to get a huge range of high resolution images for free. At present they have 132236 pictures with 182 sections organized into 3630 categories.
They have a comprehensive bank of pictures which can be used freely by non-commercial, online users. They can also be downloaded for free to be used off-line in school projects, church services, cards, leaflets, etc. They keep adding new pictures every week and only charge some amount for higher resolution pictures if ordered for commercial purposes.
- Conditions: They have one important condition that images from FreeFoto.com can be used by any online or offline user provided they attribute to the image and a link back to the image or the site. This is not much of an issue according to me, as I believe any kind of free service needs to be attributed in some way. All kinds of works of art should come with due acknowledgement, if not price.
- They allow you to download watermark free image but will ask for your email address to validate the license. Remember to attribute and link back!
- No registration or login account necessary
Another good website for downloading watermark free high quality images of various categories. They also would like attribution and the url of the image source to be published along with the photographs used.
There is also provision for payment, those who cannot publish their source name for some reasons are bound to purchase the pictures from their site at affordable prices.
This is a nice website where you can quickly navigate to the type of images you require and freely download either as zip file or jpeg file. You can also share images with your friends. Here also it's better to acknowledge the image source. You can also open a photographer's account and upload your own images for sharing.
5. BigFoto.com
Another good site for hassle-free downloading of royalty free images on various topics. Only remember to refer the source as bigfoto.com or provide a link to the site. These photographs are taken and uploaded by amateur photographers who do not want to sell their images, hence acknowledgement is mandatory.
In all the above websites, you can find a wide spectrum of wonderful images to illustrate your writing or decorate your page, download them easily as jpeg format and modify with your favourite photoediting software all for free of charge. Hence please do remember to acknowledge the source and provide the link to the respective site, as we need to give due credit to the creators. If that is not possible you can contact the site-in-charge for suggesting payment instructions, if you would like to use these images for commercial purposes.
These high quality and reasonably high resolution images from these websites can also be printed for free and used for school projects or classroom charts or posters etc. Isn't it wonderful to have access to the whole picture gallery for free?
My last piece of advice: The best source of free, copyright free and high resolution photographs are original photos created by you with your own digital camera, nothing like it. But always we may not have what we want to accompany our writing, then try these websites.
Happy Hubbing!
