The Ultimate Guide to Free Stock Images for Students
Stock photography has a bit of a tarnished reputation among professional designers. This is due mostly to the ways it’s often used by non-professionals. Poor cropping, awkward Photoshopping of people and products, and using images that are completely irrelevant to the subject matter of the project or website are just a few of the ways stock photos can be misused.
Yet stock photos are an important part of contemporary design, and whether you’re creating a project, writing a paper, or designing a website, the right photo can help transform a good piece of work into a great one. Taking advantage of the Internet’s vast collection of free stock images is a powerful way to enhance your work.
Why Free Stock Photos?
Students, as a rule, have two concerns when they’re gathering resources to create content:
- Relevance: The content has to be relevant to their project
- Convenience: The content has to be readily available
- Budget: The content has to be free
Addressing these concerns in a balanced way can be tricky. Maybe you’re living on a Ramen Noodle budget, or maybe you simply don’t have the time, skill, or resources to take professional-quality photos (or create original artwork) for your projects. And while the Internet is overflowing with content, staying on the right side of the law when choosing and using it requires some careful judgement.
That’s where free stock photography comes into play. Many professional and skilled amateur photographers choose to make their work available for free under various conditions. This huge library of photos (and illustrations) adds an essential element to your design and creation toolkit if you’re serious about creating high-quality content.
Finding Free Stock Photos
Chances are you’ve downloaded an image or graphic to help you complete a project, publication, or website. The Internet contains an abundance of resources for finding great stock images, including:
- Blogs and Tools for Finding Images: These sites are a great place to start, and offer images, general photography information and tutorials. Many also include tools for discovering even more content.
- General Stock Photo Sites: You’ll find plenty of free stock photos on these sites, with flexible licensing for academic, private, and commercial use.
- Niche Image Sites: Sometimes, tracking down the perfect image for your project requires a more specialized search. Niche image sites often focus on one specific subject, or a range of subjects that are related to one another (e.g., religious themes, agriculture, industrial activity, etc.).
- Stock Texture Sites: Textures are often overlooked in the free stock photo marketplace. But if you’re looking for the perfect background for your site, or need to edit another image, free textures can save you time, trouble, and cash.
- Government and Public Domain Stock Sites: As a basic part of their service to the citizenry, government agencies often create and distribute lareg amounts of free, professional-grade content. And some sites specialize in high-grade copies of images now out of copyright and in the public domain, which can be used by anyone.
- Commercial and “Freemium” Image Stock Sites: You probably won’t find much in the way of free content on commercial sites, but many of the major stock sites do offer the occasional free image to visitors. Also, the “freemium” market is continously expanding. These siteshave large collections of low-to-mid-grade content for free, and offer higher-resolution images for a fee.
Any and all of these sources can help you find images that meet your needs while keeping you legal. Just remember that responsibility for using an image (or other content) in a manner consistent with its licensing is your responsibility. Always read the fine print!
Copyright, Licensing, and Fair Use
Intellectual property laws protect the rights of artists, writers, and other content creators. Stealing someone else’s work—knowingly or unknowingly—can put you on the receiving end of a Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notice, or even get you sued.
Understanding copyright, fair use, and licensing work not only makes it easier for you to find and use images and other content properly, but helps you stay legal when you do so.
What is copyright?
Copyright is a legal concept that reserves the ownership and rights of use for intellectual property—images, text, films, etc.—to their original creator. Copyright protections exist in varying formats around the world, but in general the creator of a specific work owns the rights to the work for a specific period, during which they may license the right to use it to others if they so desire. After the copyright period ends, ownership may be sold, renewed by the owner (or their estate), or the content may become public domain.
NOTE: Content in the public domain is free for public use in all formats and can be adapted and modified at will.
What is the DMCA?
The DMCA was enacted in 1998 in order to ensure United States copyright conformed to the terms of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Copyright Treaty. It was also the first major effort by the U.S. government to update copyright law to reflect the changing intellectual property concerns of the Internet Age.
The DMCA enhanced intellectual property protections for content found on the Web, in large part through the use of the DMCA Takedown Notice. These notices are used by copyright owners to control the use and distribution of their property online. If someone discovers another party has used their image, text, etc. without consent, they can issue a takedown notice to the infringing party, the owner of the site where the content is hosted, or even the Web hosting provider whose servers hold the site.
Failure to comply with a DMCA takedown notice can have severe legal repurcussions, including lawsuits and (in extreme cases of theft) even arrest, so it pays to play it safe.
What is Fair Use?
In our decidedly postmodern era, people create unique and original content that often incorporates or is based on the unique and original content of others. But since intellectual property laws must protect both creators and the people who own existing content, where can we draw the line between theft and protected adaptation?
Fair use is the answer.
Under U.S. Copyright law, “criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research” are all protected uses of copyrighted material. Parodies, academic projects, and other many non-commercial uses are often protected as fair use.
But in any case where use is contested, the law requires four considerations:
- The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes
- The nature of the copyrighted work
- The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole
- The effect of the use upon the potential market for, or value of, the copyrighted work
Grey areas abound, and without any specific criteria for what constitutes fair use, you’re probably better off erring on the side of caution. Obtaining permission or a valid license for copyright-protected material (or, better yet, finding a free equivalent that’s already licensed for use) can save you a lot of headaches.
The Creative Commons License
Of course, not everyone wants to keep their content behind lock and key. One of the most popular ways to share images, text, and other creative works with others (and open them up for use) is via Creative Commons.
Created and managed by a nonprofit organization, the Creative Commons licensing system was created “…to give everyone from individual creators to large companies and institutions a simple, standardized way to grant copyright permissions to their creative work.” It favors a “some rights reserved” approach to copyright over the traditional “all or nothing” form.
Creative Commons licenses come in a variety of types, and can be used to restrict content to non-commercial use, approve it for any use with attribution, or even open up the content for any use (effectively releasing it to the public domain). Remember, though, that while Creative Commons licensing helps artists modify and refine their copyright, it doesn’t replace it.
When you’re searching for an image, tools like Flickr and Google Images can help you sort the results by license type. This is a great way to narrow down your search from the start and avoid running afoul of any potential copyright violations.
Take a closer look at how Creative Commons licensing works:
Putting It All together
Once you’ve found your (legal) stock images, you’ll want to make sure you use them in the best way possible. This will vary from project to project, but following a few simple tips can help you make the most of your images.
Check your images with Google Image Search: Are you wondering just how unique and compelling your stock image of choice is? With Google Image Search, you can upload an image to Google and do a reverse search to find all the other sites, documents, and projects where it’s been used (provided they’ve been indexed by Google, of course). This clever service can help you avoid overused images in your work and keep things interesting and original.
Avoid excessive Photoshopping: Everyone loves a good gradiant or color-correction filter, but use caution when optimizing your images. Try to avoid needless crops, clones, resizes, or filters, as all of these can turn your ideal image into an unsightly mess.
But don’t ignore Photoshop altogether: Free stock images often come from amateur sources, and as such, may require a tiny bit of tweaking from time to time. If you’re comfortable with Photoshop (or have a friend who is), taking the time to adjust the exposure, contrast and color can help make your freebie look like it was shot by a pro.
Keep it relevant: You may have found the perfect high-resolution photo of a rhinoceros, but if you’re not talking about endangered species or large mammals of the African savannah, it probably doesn’t belong in your project. Images must enhance your work, not distract from it.
Using stock photos is a fantastic way to include interesting images in your work. By paying using the proper search tools, paying attention to licensing, and taking the time to refine your stock with image editing tools, you’ll soon be creating professional-looking content that more than makes the grade.