Using Royalty-Free Images For Fun And Profit

We'll Never Be Royals

If you are making custom art for a Web site, landing page, banner ad, acquisition email or other purpose, and budget or time is an issue, you are likely to find yourself using royalty-free art, rather than original photography, illustrations or rights-managed work. This is going to cut your costs and potentially your time spent, but it can easily do damage to your brand. There are ways to get the benefit without the problem. Here's a few tips to keep in mind when you go down this path.

> If images are equal, tend towards new or rarely downloaded works.

Especially if you are looking for commonly used images (happy female model with a laptop and nuclear family walking on the beach are clear cliche favorites) in highly intensive creative categories (e-commerce, registration pages, etc.), it's far too easy to find your image on another site or twenty. This is, after all, the chief issue with royalty free. But a fairly simple search approach where you sort for new additions to a database, or see how often an image has been downloaded, can help to mitigate an overly generic look and feel.

> For heaven's sake, crop. (And make sure the watermark is removed, of course.)

I get that people are busy and that some of these projects aren't worth a ton of time on a designer's desk... but cropping isn't exactly a time-consuming process, and usually gains you some needed space for copy, calls to action, fine print, etc. If you are using the royalty-free image exactly the way it was made, that's just a recipe for brand damage, even if you pick a great one.

As for the watermark point, yeah, hardly seems worth mentioning. And if I had a $20 bill for every time I've seen it happen... I'd have a hard time closing my wallet. Double check.

> Compiling two images will nearly always buy you some time.

Always assume your competitors are seeded in your prospect list. It's just smart business to keep an eye on your outbound emails and site collateral, especially if you aren't in the lead position. So if they see you making what appears to be headway with a new image, it's sure to be copied with speed, especially in categories with high throughput for creative.

So let's not make it easy on them. Rather than just going with one single preferred image, grab two, with similar backgrounds and aspect ratios, and get to work with some very light Photoshop work. You'll sleep better.

> You bought it. You can modify it.

Again, this is just simple stuff, but it you are cropping and potentially getting into some Photoshop work, it's also not hard to change the settings on the image to make it more yours. You'd do the same thing if the image came from your own photo shoot, so why treat the purchased asset any differently?

In summation... just because you are getting your image on the cheap via a royalty free source, that does not mean that you should cut corners on image processing and production. Go the extra mile, and it can pay off big.

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You've read this far, so by all means, connect with me personally on LinkedIn.You can always email me at davidlmountain at gmail.com. And, as always, I'd love to hear what you think about this in the comments.