Instant Web Images

Website Pictures and Images

Surf to any website and the first thing you will notice is the graphics.
You can find images from your website with costs ranging from free to VERY expensive custom designs.

Like most things online, the trick is to find what you want that works at a cost you can afford.
Wherever you get images for your site, make sure you check the terms of use carefully.
You will probably find that you have one of the following rights to an image:

• Full ownership and copyright – allowing you to use an image as you please
• Rights to use an image on one or more website for either commercial or personal use
• Rights to use an image on one or more websites ONLY for personal, non-commerial use
• Rights to use an image for either personal or commercial use ONLy if you add an attribution to the owner

Finding free Images

One of the best sites for free images is stock.xchng

This has a great range of pictures arranged by categories with easy search options

A great site to find free pulic domain clip-art is Clker

Clkr Website

Clicker has both vector (resizable without losing quality) and raster / phot images
They also have a tool that allows you to convert bitmap / jpeg images to a vector format

If you find an image you like – on a website or on a site for sale – there are two ways to check if the image, or something similar is available for free:

• Use Google Images and search by dragging and dropping the image you want to find into the search box.
• Go ton tineye – which will search the web to see if your chosen image is available for free. This may not produce as many search results as Google, but it should help you find any free versions available more easily.

Tineye website

Paid for Images

One of the biggest and best known sites to purchase photo images from is istockphoto where you can find some of the best images available on web.

Istock Photo website

The only problem is that the images can be very expensive. First you have to open an account and add credit – more than the cost of one small photo.

Then when you find a photo, the price will vary depending on the size of image you want to use – even small images cost from a couple of $ upwards.

Exchange Sites

A great siteto find photo and clipart images as well as illustrations, animations and sounds is Microsofts Bing
Anybody can upload their own images here – but you should really contatct the owner of any images you want to use.
Sample images displayed when you visit the site are usually very high quality.

Microsoft Bing Images Website

Preparing Images for Your Website

Once you have found one or more images you want to use, you will probably need to edit the size or shape and maybe add text to provide extra information to anyone viewing the image on your site.

A great tool for this is Steve’s Image Resizer – an easy to use software program that allows you to instantly rotate, crop resize and add text to images one at a time or in bulk, without the complication of learning how to use complex image editing applications.

Steve's Image Resizer