Tool Highlight: Pixabay

Royalty Free and Unrestricted Stock Images

One of my favorite resources is Pixabay.com, a source for royalty free and mostly totally unrestricted stock photos. Most photos on this site come from Pixabay and I have used their images for a multitude of personal and professional projects. There are alternatives, but I find Pixabay to be the best.

I started my marketing career in print marketing, and we spent a fair amount of money on stock images. That makes a lot of sense for high touch print marketing but as I moved into creating websites, niche digital marketing materials and personal projects I realized the cost of images was often prohibitive, relative to the application and scope of audience. That puts many people in a bind, either take your own lower quality and subject limited images, the lesser evil, or use someone else’s work without permission, the much greater evil. Pixabay is a much better alternative to either.

At the same time, I have heard concerns that it devalues the work of professional photographers in some ways. I understand that concern and am sensitive to it, though I do not have a great a solution. Like so many industries, traditional industry standard practices do not align with the needs of smaller vendors and buyers. I like to think at least that outlets like Pixabay provide some exposure and because they do have permission to distribute the images the originating photographers made a choice, hopefully in their own best interest.

One thing I will do with my personal site is link back to all the originating images. Many are substantially edited, but it still seems right to me to credit the originating artist. In the future I may come up with a more engaging page for this material, but for now a simple list will suffice.