Every website needs high-resolution images in order to design a good website. That means you need to get high-resolution images from somewhere.
The best images are sourced from yourself which means pictures you took yourself or have had professionally done.
There are other options for getting good high-resolution photos though. There are options that will cost you money to download images and there are free options.
Your options will always be limited more with free options. Paid options will provide you with many more options but can get quite expensive.
Sources That Cost Money
- iStock – pricing is confusing and expensive.
- Shutterstock – prices vary from $15/image to $29/month for 10 images and up.
- DepositPhotos – price varies from $5/image to $29/month for 30 images.
- Adobe Stock – prices vary from $10/image to $30/month for 10 images and up.
There’s a lot of variations in pricing with some options being more confusing than others. Usually, the more expensive options will provide you with access to larger and more exclusive libraries of images.
Sometimes you have to balance the price of the images with how much your budget is for high-res images.
Free Sources
There are many places that offer free images to download. There is one thing you must keep in mind before you download images from these sources.
Not all images can be used legally for commercial use even from the sources below.
Look for a license on the page of the image that tells you how you can use the image. Even then these images are often uploaded by users so could have incorrect license information, the ultimate responsibility lies solely on you so be careful. Purchasing images is always your best option but you can also learn more about the legal use of images.
On Pixabay, look at the image for something like this.
Most images can be used for your business website but occasionally you’ll find one that cannot. Look on the right side of the image in the license box, it will tell you if you can use it for commercial use or not.
CC0 is the license you want to look for on free image websites or at least something that says you can use the image for commercial use.
And the list could continue to go on but you might be a bit overwhelmed with these three.
When you download images from any of these sources your best bet is to always download the highest quality image you have access to.
When you see pixel (px) dimensions, bigger is always better when download the image.
Bigger isn’t always better when you publish an image to your website so make sure you resize it and optimize the image before uploading it to your page.