Category Archives: Imagery

More Free Stock Photography

 

I’ve discussed stock photography and sites for free images before, but here’s an interesting list of sites courtesy of designskilz.com that have great free imagery.

Most of these sites work on a trickle out model of slowly releasing or emailing photographs, and many of these offer imagery with the very awesome Creative Commons Zero license which means you don’t have to worry about attribution or any fine print. Do whatever you want with them.

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Categories: Imagery.

Getty Images Has Just Made a BIG Decision

Getty Images has been playing catch-up to Shutterstock in terms of innovation and the way stock photography needs to evolve. They still have wonderful content, but have always proved intimidating and cost-prohibitive to many users. 

Well, they just announced that some imagery will now be free to use online in social and blog situations via provided embed codes. 

This is similar to the way that YouTube allows people to embed their videos on sites. Getty’s embedded images will be hosted by Getty, giving them perpetual control of the image—meaning, they can take the image down or disable the link at any time. And Getty removes the watermarks, but does include a rather large attribution at the bottom of the image. And, of course, one click of the image brings you to Gettyimages.com where—surprise—you can purchase or license the image.

Another odd thing, I think, is that the attribution is not a part of the image itself. After embedding the image, one can right-click and save the non-watermarked image to your desktop. If I were Getty, I would have put a subtle attribution on the image itself at the bottom, but I guess I’m happy they didn’t.

The BIG Problem…

This all sounds great, right? If you’re a blogger, you can go to Getty Images, find a great shot and for no cost, have a great and legal image for your story. Except…not all of Getty’s images provide embed code…is it just royalty-free imagery? No, some RF pics have it, some don’t. Some rights managed shots have it, some don’t. Same with editorial. Okay, so maybe there’s a search function only for images with embed codes? Nope.

So, this to me just points to Getty’s lack of understanding of their users and how they can increase their customer base. This was obviously a huge decision made at the top, and I applaud them for this. But where is the announcement of this on their front page? Nowhere. How long did I search for a cool embedded shot to use at the top of this post? Too long, because I had to wade through multiple photos that didn’t provide embed codes.

Here’s hoping this will evolve and Getty will make this a bit more user-friendly.

Your move, Shutterstock…

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Categories: Imagery.

Free Stock Imagery for Presentation

Since I’m asked all the time where to go to find stock imagery—and specifically, free stock imagery—let me revisit the topic.

If You Have Money to Spend…

Shutterstock is my go-to resource for imagery, vector art and video footage. Their content is superb and their pricing model is ideal for me: Monthly or annual subscriptions that give you 25 royalty-free downloads per day. I used to also have a Thinkstock subscription which operates in a similar model. For a la carte imagery, iStock, Getty, Dreamstime, 123RF and Inmagine are good options.

FREE!

The fact is that you can find more and more quality imagery online that is not only free, but also legal to use. These are the top dogs:
Some more free and specialty sites to check out:

Creative Commons

Creative Commons is a licensing scheme encompassing a few different levels. Content creators can assign a desired level of license to their images, for example, allowing them to be used by others in certain situations. The most common situation you will find is a photographer who posts an image to Flickr and specifies that this image can be used by anyone with proper attribution. Some CC licenses prohibit commercial usage or manipulating the image, but in general, you will be able to use a CC image for your presentation without issue. You can find CC imagery many places, but I like:

Search Engines

For whatever reason, I find Bing’s image search engine superior to Google’s in terms of results. Plus, Bing allows you more search criteria including Creative Commons.

Vectors & Icons

Most of the major stock sites offer vector images and graphics, but here are two free or freemium sites to check out:

* * *

One last source for photos. You. Take a photo yourself and leaving aside the issue of people in your photo, you can do pretty much anything you want with it. Such as use it at the top of your blog post on free stock imagery (like I did.)

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Categories: Imagery.

The New Multimedia Storytelling

It’s not news that people all over are experimenting with how to tell more visual stories online and on screens. One might say that this has been going on since the birth of the personal computer and then the internet, but there is definitely a new age just beginning. I think Nancy is at the forefront in her way, but I would have to say that the New York Times is leading the pack in their way. They are still the masters at visual journalism and visualizing data, but they have also been experimenting with multimedia storytelling for longform articles. It started with a story called Snow Fall, and has been followed up with similar (and in my view more successful) pieces such as The Jockey and A Game of Shark and Minnow.

Snow Fall, which the New York Times worked on supposedly for a whole year, received a lot of praise and criticism, and in the end the consensus is that it wasn’t entirely successful. But that’s not the point. It’s the experimentation and the willingness to explore new storytelling techniques that is keeping The New York Times and people like Nancy Duarte at the forefront. 

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Categories: Imagery, Storytelling, Visual Thinking.

Pretty Visuals Trump Text — Even If It Kills

We all should know by now that the Picture Superior Effect is real, and that people respond to, process and remember imagery far better than text. But a story about a toxic swimming hole which is getting some renewed attention right now proves that no matter what the text says, some people just insist on believing in the pretty picture. 

So, apparently there was a quarry in the UK that was a magnificent shade of turquoise…

The water so was so beautiful that some people refused to heed the clear textual warnings that the water was actually highly toxic and dangerous…

And they went swimming. And got sick. Very sick. Apparently the PH level in the “blue lagoon” is equal to that of bleach. Yech.

So what did the town do? If people were only going to let their sense of aesthetics guide their decisions, then that’s the way it was going to be. The town died the lagoon black!

The Picture Superiority Effect rules again!

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Categories: Imagery, Visual Thinking.
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