Where do you get your images?

Alright, so I've been browsing around the BST Contests forum lately, and looking through the various banner contests. The banners often contain stock photos of people.

I was wondering where do you guys get your images from? Do you buy them? Just grab them from online?

 

Both, i get free and also purchase.

Free:

http://www.sxc.hu/index.html <-- use 90% of the time but recently i began using flickr for some

Paid:

I like http://en.fotolia.com/ but i have used others too, like crestock etc

 

Thanks. And you're allowed to just use any without crediting the site or user?

 

No, definately dont just use them without attribution, for example on flickr, search under the various Creative Commons licences, each tell you how you attribute the person who put up the images on flickr.

For those not available with a creative commons licence, you can try messaging the person who put them up and ask politely for permission to use them.

Some will allow, some will refuse, in the past ive had at least one person reply "absolutely not" to my request to use her images.

Note that not all people uploading images to flickr or other sites like that have permission themselves, either from the people appearing in photos or where they got them from.

So its not impossible that you could get contacted by someone one day asking why you have one of their images on your site.

Be careful what you use, theres a lot of misunderstanding regarding the use of content online, many people think that you can just grab what you like.

Like celeb pics, most people dont have the right to use them, you can infact though purchase images (to use) of celebs from places like gettyimages.

I prefer to practice caution with image use, thats why i buy images, in between using free ones and giving credit where requested.

 

Thanks for the response, that's really helpful. Looking to hear from more members.

 

Thank you for the input pipes

Very useful feedback.

 

Another good source if photobucket.com as they recently have allowed all of the images placed there to be used.

 

Istockphoto.com has great images, its a pay site, but is only a few dollars an image. If you are doing work for clients, you need to have liscenses for your photos, you can just take them for free online, unless the site explicitly says you can use it for free

 

Dreamstime (paid) , sxc as mentioned before (free) and bigstockphoto -one of the only paid sites that allows you to use images in templates .

 

I am purchasing images from the shutterstock image site

 

ShutterStock is the best place for getting stock images...

 

Buy them from stock sites, or you can try to find some really good photos from deviantArt.com or freepixels.com.

As everyone said, just read the terms and make sure you can use what you want to use for commercial use.

 

Yes, good quality, free Images or Photos for commercial use are usually bound to restrictions BUT, since they are FREE, most Terms of Service (TOS) are very easy to comply with, such as :

• not reselling them for profit (don't enter into competition)
• acknowledge the Owner (what's the harm in that?)

HUGE Reviewed List of free, good quality Images

Here's my personal favourite resource of truly free, high res images: http://www.photoxpress.com/

-

 

i use google.
warez sites
or i usally take pictures in real life and make things out of them.

 

Thanks for that list!

And thanks to all you have posted. This has definitely given me a better idea how to go about using images.

 

stockvault.net is a site where i go for images.

 

If you want to use Flickr Image. This is the post you must read.
http://www.skelliewag.org/a-complete-guide-to-finding-and-using-incredible-flickr-images-162.htm

 

**cough**see my signature**cough**

But seriously, lots of good suggestions in this thread. My personal favorite is dreamstime.com. Anyway, DO be careful about how you use royalty free images. Shutterstock just won a settlement against a user who used images innapropriately. Read more about it here.