Images are everywhere on the internet. Rarely will you come across a webpage of any kind that includes only text – graphical components are an integral part of the online experience, and quality photos are perhaps the most important and useful of those elements.
So, when you are building some type of web property, you are sure to need some images to add to your arsenal. It’s an easy choice to use photos on a website, but figuring out where to get those photos is a little tricky. Taking them yourself is one option, but photography is tricky and time-consuming. Also, if you only have a smartphone to use as a camera, you might not get the kind of results that you were hoping to achieve.
Utilizing a trustworthy stock photo source is the best way to get what you need for each project quickly and easily. Let’s go over some of the advantages of using a trusted source when you need to pick out a few images.
Stay Out of Legal Trouble
First and foremost, finding a good source of stock photos is important because it will help you stay on the right side of the law. It’s illegal to use photos someone else has taken without their permission – whether they give you that permission for free, or you pay for it through the purchase of a stock photo.
Simply grabbing images from around the web that you find through random Google searches is not an appropriate strategy for adding graphics to your site. There is a good chance that you will receive notices from the owners of those images, asking you to take them down immediately. Instead, head to a trusted stock image seller when you need photos so you can be sure that there will be no problems popping up later on. You will have paid for the image and will be free to use it according to the terms of the license for that image.
Get Great Quality
You always want to use quality images on your website. A low-quality picture can quickly take away from what you are trying to create, and your users might subconsciously lose some trust in your site if the pictures don’t meet their expectations. This is another great reason to be sure to work with a trusted source of stock images when doing your searching. You won’t have to worry about lackluster images taking away from what your site offers, and the images you select will look great for as long as you decide to leave them on your pages.
Good images are high in resolution so they can maintain their quality even when presented in a large format. This is a common problem seen in images that come in a relatively small format – when you look at them on the stock photo site, the resolution might look great. But if you are going to stretch that picture out a bit to make it fill up the space you have in mind, it could become pixelated and essentially unusable. Pay attention to the size of the image in pixels when ordering to make sure the picture you select will be up to the task you have at hand.
Have Plenty of Options
You don’t want to go searching around the entire internet to find the pictures you need for a project. Instead, it’s better to be able to work with the same stock photo source time after time, which is only possible if that source has a nice selection of images that work for your needs. Of course, the needs of every business are different, so once you find a source that happens to have a lot of the types of pictures that you will need, create an account and stick with it over the months and years to come.
Save Time
Yet another advantage of having a quality stock photo source on your side is saving time while working on your projects. Whether you are building a website or some other type of marketing asset, you don’t want to spend the whole day trying to track down an image. If you don’t know where to turn for images and you just start off with a generic Google search, you’ll be fighting an uphill battle.
It’s better to already know where you are going to turn as soon as the need for a picture arises. You can just save your favorite site – like Planet Stock Photo – and you’ll be ready to go immediately. This helps you stay on track to complete your project in a timely manner so you can move on to other things. If you tend to find that searching for images is the most time-consuming part of your marketing work, picking out a photo site that you trust will cut down on the time you waste tremendously.
Build a Great Site
Perhaps the best reason of all to have a stock photo site available that you can trust is that you’ll be able to construct a better site than what you could build without stock photos. Sure, you could organize the site nicely and write great copy without stock images, but you’d always be missing something.
It’s the images that will bring the finished product together, and it’s probably not realistic to take all of those photos on your own. Sure, having some original photos on your site is a great idea, but you’ll fill in your graphic needs with stock photos to come away with something that you love.
It should be clear by now that you’ll only want to use a source you can trust for your stock image needs. Fortunately, you’ve already found such a source – Planet Stock Photo is the perfect place to pick out the images for an upcoming project, so get started today and find your first photo here on our site. Have fun exploring!