Why are photos important
Images are really important to my business and should be to all businesses. Images are very powerful because people respond to images more than they do to the written word in our content driven world. However, not every business can afford a full time photographer to follow them around and document their lives in photos.
I also believe that if you are going to post photos they need to be good quality. Not everyone is an Annie Lebowitz so this is where you can use the plethora of stock photos sites that are available.
I use stock photos every day, several times a day. In this post I wanted to offer you a few of my favourites.
The stats
Here are just a few stats to show you how important images are in the day to day world of a business woman.
- Over 40 billion images have been posted to Instagram so far
- Tweets with images receive 150% more retweets than tweets without
- Articles with images between 74 – 100 words are twice more likely to shared
- Facebook posts with images receive 2x more engagement
- Beyonce’s Instagram post announcing her second pregnancy is the most liked image with over 11M likes
- On average people get distracted within eight seconds
- On Instagram photos showing faces get 30% more likes
- Pinterest has over 50 billion pins
The licences
Just a quick warning about the licences. Most of the free sites I am going to recommend are under creative commons public domain licences or are free from copyright restrictions but please check when you come across a free stock site because some require attribution.
Unsplash
This is my go to site, the one I will always go to first. It is a free stock site that offers really high quality and modern photos. It is said that the site has over 65,000 contributing photographers. There is a constant stream of new images but they have a decent search so you can find what you are looking for.
The images are free to use for public and commercial use under the Unsplash licence.
To can take a look at www.Unsplash.com
Pixabay
This is a fantastic site and my next go to after Unsplash. The images can be mixed, some modern, some can seem a little dated. The reason why I love this site is that it has such a good search function. So you can put really random search criteria and chances are you will get a choice of images you are looking for.
Images sit under a creative commons public domain licence.
You can take a further look yourself at www.pixabay.com
Pexels
This is another great site, I use this when the other two sites above fail me. The images are similar to Pixabay but sometimes offer something different. The search is not as good as Pixabay but sometimes the lack of choice can be an advantage if you need something quickly because searching for images can send you down a rabbit hole.
Images are licensed under Create Commons Public Domain
Search for yourself at www.pexels.com
Splitshire
A limited number of images compared to some of the other large free stock sites. However, there is still a good choice of really high quality images to choose from.
Creative commons public domain licence
Try for yourself www.splitshire.com
Picjumbo
A good site with new photos added daily. You can use for personal and business use. A high number to choose from and do have some different images than the other sites.
Creative commons public domain licence
Try for yourself www.picjumbo.com
Foodies Feed
Food is one of the most popular types of images to be posted. However, we can all be professional food photographers so this is a great specialised site for food photography.
Creative commons public domain licence
Can be found at www.foodiesfeed.com
Burst by Shopify
This website was created by Shopify to help its user create professional sites. The images are free to everyone and free for personal and commercial use. There is a lot to choose from and unique to some of the others images you find on other sites.
Kaboompics
This site, whilst not massive compared to some of the others offers really good, unique and high quality photographs. There are a number of categories including people, lifestyle, urban and home decor.
Licence is creative commons public domain
Check out this site at www.kaboompics.com
Librestock
This is a really useful site because it curates images from 47 free stock sites including some of the ones that have been mentioned in this post. The search is sometimes not as good as the sites themselves but so useful if you don’t know what you are looking for or if you want to be quick. Well worth adding to your list.
Check the site out at www.librestock.com
Creative Market
There comes a time when you may need to invest in images that are even more professional, whether it is for your website or a campaign for your products/services. Creative Market is the go too site to purchase images. There is a huge number to choose from either individual images or packages.
It is free to look and they often offer discounts for first time purchasers.
Take a look for yourself www.creativemarket.com
To make your own
So now you have my favourites but I will suggest one thing. You need to ensure that you add your brand to everything that you do and I don’t just mean your logo, I mean consistency in the type of images that you post, you can edit them, make them black and white, crop them or add your regular filter. I am going to post soon how I edit my images before I post.
Just take time to make the images your own brand.
