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4 Essential Tips on How to Find the Best Legal Photo Resources

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Visual content is King, and not without a reason. First of all, most of us perceive information as images. Secondly, we tend to spend more time on web pages decorated with visuals. Last but not least, we are two times more likely to pick the product accompanied by vivid images and videos. And if even in the era of YouTube, shooting a video still remains a mystery for many, what everyone is truly capable of is picking worthy photos to adorn blog posts, product descriptions, and marketing materials.

However, blinded by the abundance of free images on the web, aspiring lovers of beautiful imagery every once in a while violate the copyright law and put themselves into the danger of being caught in litigation before they know it. But in fact, there are a few tricks to find the image source that you need and extract as many photos from there as you need. Without further ado, let’s delve into those!

1. Bother to Get Permission to Use Images from Google

Google keeps a scary amount of data and definitely loads of photos to grab and use, huh? Sounds good, but the truth is that most pictures that you can find via Google Search are protected by copyright, and even those ‘labeled for reuse with modification.’ Alas, Google is not certified to bear responsibility for labels it assigns to photos and therefore it may set you up by assuming copyrighted images to be free.

In other words, as long as you are willing to stay on the legal side of the fence, you are obliged to contact the owner of the photo and ask him/her for permission to use the intellectual property. Any arrogance potentially leads to lawsuits, especially if you represent a big company worth arguing with.

2. Use Third-Party Image Search Engines to Boost the Process

While Google is undoubtedly the most comprehensive search engine, you might try other search engines as well: Bing Images, Flickr, Yahoo Images, Yandex, Picsearch, Creative Commons, Pinterest Visual Search Tool, etc. Whichever one you use, make sure the image has been allowed for commercial reuse or commercial reuse with modification if you’re willing to edit the picture to make it unique, adapt to the style of your business, etc. If neither the watermark nor metadata contains the required info, as well as Google reverse image search returns no results, better avoid using the shot since it’s not safe.You can use Zenserp – google image api to help you search images online.

3. Search on Free and Paid Photo Stocks

While cruising through search engines might be tiresome and unexpectedly ineffective, you have all the chance to facilitate search by navigating right to the vast larders for all types of images – photo stocks. Indeed, free and paid photos repositories are goldmines of photos that may be used ‘as is’ or after slight refinements are done. One way or another, you are likely to end up searching photos on one of these top-notch photo repositories:

4. Separate the Wheat from the Chaff

Regardless of whether the stock employs 10 or 100 million images, the only thing that you should worry about is how many of those pictures are relevant to your search request. Take advantage of advanced search options embedded into photo stocks to sieve out all relevant images. And if those are not enough to satisfy your hunger for perfection & beauty, proceed to the next photo stock in your list.

Farewell Message

The truth is, the excellence of the photo doesn’t necessarily meet the price tag attached to it. Among hundreds of millions of paid and free images on the web, there are always obscenely overpriced and hilariously undervalued ones. Heaps of high-quality pictures are waiting to be unearthed – just dare to dig them out!