It is possible to get some superb pictures to put on your Web site to entertain the visitors and encourage them to visit more often. And you do not need to break any copyright laws to do this.

(Skip this next bit if you want to just get to the nitty gritty and nip down to Here is a list of sites I have used.)

Nailing my colors to the mast I am against the copyright laws are they are written and as they are implemented. It is totally farcical that, for example, ‘Happy Birthday to You’ is copyright protected. It was written by two sisters from Kentucky, Mildred J. Hill and Patty Smith Hill in 1893. Yes, the words were slightly different but not by much. The current words first appeared in a song book by Robert H. Coleman in 1924.

Mildred died in 1916 but Jessica was able to get it copyrighted in 1935. She died in 1946 and it therefore theoretically have been in the public domain in 1991. But using all sorts of legal shenanigans it has protection has been extended until 2030. And believe it or not, AOL swears it owns the copyright.

Having got that off my chest I can return to the main subject.

If you post pictures on Flickr you are given the option on joining of marking all of your pictures as copyright.

So many of the pictures on Flickr are copyright — but not all. If you look in the right hand column on any Flickr shot you will see a listing of Additional Information. On that it may have a copyright sign or it may say ‘Some rights reserved.’ It is a long and boring job working your way through Flickr to find the right image which is NOT in copyright and it is easier to go elsewhere.

Here is a list of sites I have used:

Stock.xchng is, for me, the mother lode. I have used, literally, hundreds of pictures from this site. Where needed I have dropped a note to the photographer for permission — and nobody has ever turned me down. There are over 350,000 pictures on this site and pretty much all of them are usable. No wonder this site gets 100 million page views a month.

FreeFoto.com has 128,830 images last time I looked. If you are going to use them in advertising or in some commercial way then you need to deal with paying money. Otherwise the rules are simple: anyone, by which we mean commercial and non-commercial alike, can use FreeFoto.com images in an online setting, providing they provide attribution to the image and a link back to FreeFoto.com (either the image or the main site). This license allows blogs, social networking sites and use in emails, just to name a few, providing they provide the required attribution, this includes sites that pay people to write, carry advertising or are selling and promoting products. The only requirement the attribution and link back. I always provide the linkback to the photo and as I am using WordPress for most sites this is totally unobtrusive.

Public Domain Pictures.net is full of free public domain photos. In fact, the small picture that heads this article is from there. It was taken by by Petr Kratochvil and has been downloaded 6,846 times which makes it very popular.

Large Pictures has a reasonable selection. They are in a very high resolution and all they want is a link back or a small donation, size not specified.

BigFoto.com works in the same way but its classification system is, perhaps, easier to use. It warns that all of the pictures are by amateurs but, as far as I can see, they are all pretty handy at getting a good shot.

Free Digital Photos. net It spells it out loud and clear at the beginning: All our photos are free for corporate and personal use. Every image is free, with an option to buy high resolution versions for use in print or graphic design. And the pictures are seriously good.

Related:

Entry was posted on Wednesday, December 31st, 2008 at 1:33 am under Flickr, stock photography.

Read more entries by Gareth Powell.