Free Images for Your Email Newsletter and Blog
 
 There are many web sites available on the Web that provides free images for email newsletters, blogs and web sites. The images can be used to improve the design of your newsletter, blog or web site. The images can normally be used for both private use and commercial use. Besides free images you can also buy high-quality images for a low cost from these picture web sites.

In the Free Newsletter Templates for Email Marketing article on our web site we listed some web sites that provide professional and beautiful newsletter templates than can be used as basic templates for your or your company's email newsletters. After you have adapted a newsletter template for your needs, and for example added a logotype, and changed font and colors, the process of creating a specific issue of your newsletter remains. It is very likely that you want to include images in your newsletter, and besides images that are specific for your company and your products, you may sometimes want to include general images and symbolic images. Images make your newsletter easier to read and will also improve the reader's impression of your newsletter, your products and your company.
  
Search engines that can find free images
There exist many search engines on the Internet that are specialized in searching for images. First we want to present Creative Commons which is a web site that use another search engines to find images. The web site use for example Google, Flickr, Wikipedia, Fotopedia and SpinXpress in the search process. The Creative Commons web site can be used to find images for both commercial use and for private use. The web site uses a special license type that is named Creative Commons, and your can read more about this licensing type on this web page.
 
 A powerful search engine that is specialized in searching for pictures is picsearch which have more than 3 billion pictures in their database! When you search for pictures, the result is shown as small thumbnails, and if you click on a thumbnail the web page where the original picture is located is opened. You can also open up the picture itself, in its original size, in an easy way. Via the picsearch search engine you can search for images of a specific color, with a specific size or with a specific orientation (portrait, landscape or square).
 
The everystockphoto search engine is a search engine that is specialized in finding free photos from many sources. They have over 18 million photos in their database. The license type for the photos may vary, but many of the photos can be used for commercial purposes.
 

 
Also Google, Yahoo!, Bing etc. can search for images
Also well-known search engines like Google, Yahoo!, Bing and Ask have specialized search engines that can look for images. They are often feature-rich and you choose if you want to find images of a specific color, size or file type. But remember that many of the images that are shown in the search result are protected by copyright laws, so check thoroughly the license terms for a image if you plan to use it in your blog, web site or newsletter.
   
 List of web sites with free images
 Below is a list with web sites that contain free images, and that we recommend:
 
n FreeDigitalPhotos.net Free Digital Photos is a web site that has a large number of royalty-free and high-quality images in different sizes. The smallest size can be used for free, but if you want to use a larger size of an image you have to pay a small fee. The images are placed in different categories and it is very easy to navigate in the web site. They have both photos and computer generated graphics on their web site.
n Dreamstime Contains more than 15 million royalty-free stock photos. You can change language for the web site's user interface, for example to German or Swedish.
n Free Stock Images A web site with many images that can be used for blogs, web sites and email newsletters.
n Morguefile A good web site with many images that can be use for free.
n NASA At NASA's web site you can find many beautiful photos from the Space. The images are generally not copyrighted so you can use them freely in your projects.
n Wikimedia A database with more than 15 million images. The images can normally be freely reused, but some restrictions may exist in some cases. You can read more on this web page.
 

  
 Web sites where you can find high-quality images
 If you don't want to spend too much time on searching for free images it is better to buy the images. Below you will find a list with web sites where you can buy images (photos, illustrations, clip arts etc.) of a high quality:
 
n Bigstock Bigstock offers over 13 million royalty-free photographs and illustrations from photographers and artists around the globe, available for almost any purpose.
n Fotolia Fotolia offers royalty-free images, vectors and videos for a low cost. Their image library is very large; they have over 20 million images available for download.
n iStockPhoto iStockPhoto has existed since year 2000, and have more than 10 million high-quality and royalty-free images available on their web site. They offer also videos and audio / music.
n Photocase.com The Photocase web site contains many royalty-free images to a reasonable price.
n Shutterstock Shutterstock has more than 20 million stock photos, illustrations, vectors, and videos on their web site. They have a very large variety of categories, so regardless of type of image you are looking for, you will probably find it on Shutterstock.
 
Free icons
 There are also many web sites and search engines available that are specialized in providing icons; both free icons and icons that cost some money. Three search engines that we recommend are: IconFinder, FindIcons and IconArchive. There you will find lots of icons in image formats like PNG, GIF, and ICO. Sometimes also in image formats like PSD (Adobe PhotoShop) and BMP. Also ShutterStock have a large number of icons with different motives.

 
Image formats for the Web
The image web sites mentioned above in this article supports most image formats that are available today; for the Web, for printing, for use in software, etc. If you want to use the images on the Web it is important to use an image format that is adapted for the Internet, for example: JPEG (JPG), GIF and PNG. You should avoid image formats as BMP, ICO and TIFF for images that should be published on the web. Many web browsers do not support them (they will just not be shown on the screen), and BMP and TIFF images are also unnecessary big in file size, which means slower load time when a user opens a web page. For a TIFF image with a high resolution (DPI) it can be very much slower.
 
Do you need to convert images?
Sometimes an image can be of wrong size or have the wrong resolution (DPI). This can be handled with an image resizer program. If you need such a program we recommend you to take a look on our Image Resizer software. It is an easy-to-use program that can be used to resize photos etc. And best of all, it is free to use!
   
  
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Article written by: Mika Larramo Swedish