Finding Free Graphics For Your Marketing Materials: Virus-free, Made By Professionals

Graphics can be expensive

Graphics can be expensive. With services such as Getty Images, Corbis or Jupiter, it's possible to pay $100+ for a single image, and over $1000 for a package of photographs. Not having this sort of budget when starting my business, I looked for alternatives. When I first ran a Google search for "free graphic," I was left with some results that made me feel like my computer immediately needed a bath. I found that the best of these sites were alternatively difficult to use, full of low quality clip art, and/or were hotbeds of pop-up ads. After looking around long enough, I did manage to find a few good options.

Dreamstime.com sells royalty-free images for cheap (typically $1 or $2 an image if you buy in a small quantity, but as low as 20 cents if you buy packages). More importantly, they have a nice inventory of completely free images, too. Search for a reasonably obscure word, and you're likely to find some decent matches among the free stuff. For example, I searched for "emu" and there were 17 free images to choose from. When I searched for "wheat," there were 112 free images. A search for "Lithuania" yielded 19 free images. Someone on a budget of exactly zero can generally cobble something together here.

Stockxpert.com and Bigstockphoto.com are other sites offering high quality images for next-to-nothing, but they do not have the completely free section that Dreamstime does. That said, just about anyone trying to start a business is probably not going to have their marketing plans derailed by $1 or $2.

iStockphoto.com apparently has a far greater volume of images than the other cheap graphics sites. For example, the same search for Emu yields 501 results, Lithuania has 1185 pictures, and wheat has over 25,000. But, the prices are a little higher. Medium sized images tend to cost about $9 for a single purchase, but if your needs are large or ongoing, there are subscription and bulk options that offer greatly reduced per-unit prices.

One consideration regarding these photographs is that the while the licensing is royalty-free, it doesn't necessarily mean that you can share their usage to third parties. Be careful of the legality of distributing these images, if third parties are going to download them and print them for their own purposes. The license that you're buying/receiving for free is intended for your own use. When you hear of medium or small businesses hiring their own photographers, it's often because of this re-distribution concern, not necessarily because they can't find exactly what they want.

Both of these sites rely on communities of contributors, so they're also useful if you'd like to share some cool photos you've taken. Photographers either contribute their work for free (in Dreamstime free images) or can share revenues.

Have I noticed a difference in quality between the high dollar images and those I can find for free/almost free? Not especially. The truly magical graphics, the captivating graphics that remain in my memory as incredibly interesting or creative, were generally (though not always!) on the expensive sites. But I've never found myself lacking for acceptable, quality images with the free/cheap stuff. No one has ever suspected the tiny budget. Generally speaking, these are not images from the land of misfit graphics.

by: Rebecca Tyler

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