A Useful Guide to Free Photos, Media & More

Where to Find Free Photographs

As a writer, you're not always concerned with visual or audio artwork. It's often secondary to the Muse dictating the story. As a self-published author, however, you need media for marketing your author brand ethically and legally.

So, how do you find it and use it?

The Ultimate Guide to Free Photos, Media & More was too ambitious, plus it wasn't an achievable goal.

Instead, I created A Useful Guide to Free Photos, Media & More, with more than a dozen top resources to help you find content to illustrate your books, your website and your social media without spending a dime on photos, video, music and more.

I hope you find it helpful.

I began curating my list of free, downloadable content more than 10 years ago, because of a client who ran into problems using stock photography. As a customer of a popular word processing software, she had permission to use the artwork that came packaged on the software CD. That changed when a large stock photo company purchased the rights to the images. The software customers had no way of knowing about the change of ownership.

My client received a harassing email, threatening a lawsuit if she did not pay $2,000 for "illegally" using an image that came pre-packaged on the CD she legally purchased. She removed the image, but refused to pay for a product she had the right to use, stating this in a strongly worded letter. The harassment stopped, but the lesson was learned: Be careful when using media because legal rights can be transferred without your knowledge.

Let that lesson be in the forefront of your mind as you browse through these websites, which offer free media. Rights can be transferred and what was free today, may not be free in 10 years.

Throughout the years, that particular stock photography company has grown into one of the world's largest media aggregator and resale company, and with that has come several billion-dollar lawsuits, and counter lawsuits because all digital media contain "metadata" and sophisticated software can search the Internet, including eBooks, and find proprietary content.

Another time, a small online newspaper hired a part-time copy editor, and that person illustrated an article with a photo she found on Google images. The photographer, rightfully so, contacted the newspaper and told them they didn't have permission to use the image. Then, following in the footsteps of the largest photographic resale company above, he sent the publisher an invoice for $700. I recommended that she remove the image, apologize profusely, and educate her employees on how to search for safe images.

She removed the image, educated her employees on the dangers of using copyrighted images, and she also paid the fee. She didn't want to risk a lawsuit.

You can avoid situations like these if you are certain you know who owns the content you want to use, and that you're complying with the law.

If you're not sure of ownership, considering using TinEye, a website that conducts a reverse image search. Find it here: .

Or, use the Advanced Safe Search function on Google's Image browser:

Be careful!