“A picture is worth a thousand worth.”

You may not agree with that, but still images are important components of every website. A product image could help increase conversions in product sales on e-commerce sites. Images also create an atmosphere for the page, if not the entire site.

Long blog posts, when sprinkled with images can grab the readers’ attention. Those images are soothing and give professional look to the blog post. I use a lot images on my other blogs, but not in this one.

Images are also useful for professional e-newsletter design. Small business owners and service professionals need at least a few images on their sites and marketing materials.

The problem is, how could you find quality images or stock photos online? This blog post will help you to do it.

Where to Find High Quality Photos

The most obvious places to locate images are search engines. The image search feature allows you to locate any kind of images using keywords, just like when searching for the Web.

All Google, Yahoo and MSN have their own image search engine. The drawback is, while you can find a lot of quality images on Google images and others, it can be hard to determine the license of the work. Using images without the permission to do so may put yourself against copyright infringement.

The risk is not worth it, so scratch this option.

The second way to find high quality photos is by using stock photography sites. iStockPhoto is an example of such site which offer royalty free photos at $1 each (for extra small images).

Their photos are of top quality because they are produced by professionals. The drawback is they cost money. Because it is created for commercial purpose, often the result is bland.

The third way to find photos is on image specific search engines and services. Two examples are everystockphoto and flickr.

Both sites have image search feature that supports searching for royalty free photos.

Where to Find the Right Photo for Your Needs

The most important thing to look for before searching for photos is to limit the search only for photos with the right license that suits your needs. You don’t want to search first, find one photo that you really like, only to find that it isn’t allowed for commercial use.

Flickr contain images that fall either under a traditional copyright or Creative Commons (CC) license. everystockphoto contains other licenses as well besides CC, such as GNU Free Documentation License, imageafter and even Public Domain.

You want to read all the terms of use in each license before you use any photos. Public Domain images, as the name implies, are images that are free to use and modify. Basically you can do anything with them.

Popular non-copyright images on Flickr come under Creative Commons license. Each image is available under one of the six combinations of CC licenses. The difference in each license dictates how and where you can use each image.

Read Flickr’s and everystockphoto’s CC license combinations first and the meaning of each symbol in the sidebar before you search and grab any photo for your own use.

Searching and Grabbing Images/Photos

Each site offers easy way to find images or photos. If you want to use photos on your own site, I recommend that you either search on everystockphoto or use the Attribution Licensed photo search in Flickr.

With this license, all you have to do after using the images is to to credit the author with a link back to their profile or image page. This license allows you to modify the images either by cropping or writing on them.

If you don’t want to leave credit, you can either search for Public Domain photos or pay for them at one of the stock photography sites. You don’t need very high quality photos for web sites so the cost can be very affordable.

When you’ve found the right image that you want, simply copy that to your own computer and make the necessary modification (if the license allows it). Next you can upload the image to your own web server and grab the link for use on your own web site. Don’t forget to provide a linkback (usually at the bottom of the image) to the author’s profile or image page.

That’s it. Now you can really spice up your website with millions of images that are available on the Net without worrying about copyright issue.

This is a win-win situation. You have the rights to use the picture while they gain the exposure every time other web publishers use it.