Images are a great way to enhance your presentations or documents, but not every company or project has the budget to hire professional photographers or the resources to create images in-house. So where can you go to find them? It isn’t hard to find images with a quick Google search, but that doesn’t mean it’s okay for you to use them in every situation. If you produce consumer-facing documentation, you can run into copyright or permissions issues if you don’t select your images carefully. Read on for some tips about how to go about finding images the right way.
Stock Image Sites
Stock image sites are a great place to go to when looking for images. Adobe Stock, Shutterstock, and iStock are a few examples of websites that are available, but there are tons out there, so I suggest doing some research on where the images are sourced from before diving into any new site.
These sites generally have the benefit of clearly laying out the situations in which the images can be used. For example, some provide free images but not for commercial use, others have royalties or fees and specify where the image can be used and how many impressions (think copies or number of views) this includes.
While it’s easy to find images online, ensuring they are available for your particular use is key. Good stock image sites should make this clear. Be wary of any site claiming to offer free images without any caveats – you don’t want to use content that wasn’t provided with the artist’s permission.
Content Libraries
Some software programs may have their own content libraries available – for example, the stock images available to insert directly in Word. While this can be a convenient means of enhancing your documents, you again need to be careful about the copyright and permissions available for these images. Using them in your PowerPoint presentation at work may be fine, but if you make that same presentation commercially available, you may run into issues. It’s always best to check what the policy is for each software library.
Enhancing Your Search
As you dive into your search, the results can be overwhelming. There are millions of images available, so the trick is finding the ones that work for your project. If you aren’t finding what you’re looking for, try variations or synonyms of your key words – for example, if you are searching for “building”, try “construction”, “production”, “assembly”, or “fabrication” depending on what you’re looking for.
Most stock sites will also have filters you can use. These can help if you are looking for a particular type of image (illustration vs. picture or vector vs. raster) or if you need a certain color, orientation, size, etc. If your site doesn’t have these options, try adding them as extra key words for your search.
What About AI?
The use of AI is becoming more prevalent every day, and it’s tempting to type in a prompt to find the image you need. I would caution against this from a quality standpoint, if you are producing documents that are customer-facing. We’ve all seen those AI images that look good at first but quickly show their flaws on closer inspection. Using a reputable stock image website would be my go-to over generative AI – though keep in mind that even these sites are not free from AI images. Adobe Stock, for example, indicates on an image whether it was AI-generated, and you can filter out these images when using its search. And if you do choose to use AI images, inspect them carefully before adding any to your project, just in case.
Happy searching!
About the Author
Follow on Linkedin More Content by Breanne MacDonald
