I'm too lazy to take pictures, i'm too cheap to buy them.

I own a large portfolio of sites. I have been using images from Google images and putting them on my site. However, I realize that this presents some liability. Sure, I may never get in trouble - but down the road a potential buyer might be afraid to purchase sites with illegal images on them. Basically, I need some sort of image on my site for the SEO that I do. So heres my plan

1) Open Photoshop
2) Open a canvas
3) Write the topic in the text editor on the canvas
4) Change the font to some cool color
5) Save as a picture

Thoughts?

 

Agree w Kerosene, SXC and free photos with credit for photographer, There's a lot more sites like SXC which offer free photos, even on Deviantart You can find some neat photos that only requires link to an author.

 

Dear Furca,
I don't see the point of turning your titles into images as far as SEO is concerned. It would be counter-productive. The only things that will help you in SEO, when it comes to images, are to give the image a keyword reach name (For example, six-packs-abs-product-1.jpg rather than image001.jpg) as well as making good use of the <alt> and <title> tags, with keyword reach relevant descriptions. Also make sure the image is relevant to the text neighbouring it.

As Tooschee and Kerosene have mentioned, SXC is an excellent source for free images. There's actually a forum there where you can request images you cannot find on their database. If you still can't find what you need, you might want to check iStockPhoto. Albeit not free, they've got the best stock photos on the net by far, and you are bound to find what you're after there. For the low resolution you probably need you can get images for as low as $3, as long as they're not for resale.

Another free alternative would be public domain images, which are quite easy to find on the web.
Here's a list of public domain resources from Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain_image_resources

Public Domain images are images which, for various reasons (Mainly age) are no longer subject to copyright so that anyone can use them for virtually anything.

Hope that helps
1kaday

 

the idea isn't very bad...but you can combine different pictures in photoshop to develop a totally unique picture, try it!

 

SXC is one option. Dreamstime also has a free section.

 

You can also use istockphoto.com. They are very cheap and very nice pictures are there.

 

FineArtAmerica dot com has many excellent photographers. If you offered them a credit and link, I think many would let you use their images.
Eventually someone is bound to find their work you took from Google Images on your sites and issue DMCA notices against you with your host.

 

If im the photographer and saw my pics edited for another one's benefits, that's gonna suck. Maybe you can recreate the concept of the photo, but not edit it because that's still stealing.