This article gives you brief ideas on where to source images for your writing that you can legally use without getting sued.

When you are writing books or blogs, you might want to include images. They break up the text, make your writing easier to read, and provide some color. But many people make a huge mistake by going to a search engine online, grabbing an image, and using it on their site. That can get you sued! Today we will talk about image licenses and where you can source images for your books and blogs.

Image Licenses

You will encounter four main types of licenses for images (there are more, but these are the most common).

Public Domain

The public domain license means that it has been released to the world without any restrictions. A public domain image can be used in any project, in any way, for commercial or non-commercial works. Images enter the public domain after a long period after the original creator's death. A creator can also choose to release their images in the public domain, and here in the USA, works produced by the government are, generally speaking, also public domain.

Creative Commons

The Creative Commons license has a few variations, from CC0 to CC4. The CC0 are also public domain. A person wanting to enter a work into the public domain without any restriction may add a CC0 to the work, allowing it to be used for commercial use. Most CC licenses can be used for a variety of uses, but it really depends on what the creator asks for in their license release, which can be difficult to track down the original release. Wikipedia generally does a good job with this. Most CC licenses can be used, BUT must be credited back to the user in either the image or the text tied to the image.

Royalty Free

This license type is one where you pay for the use one time, and then you can continue to use the image in the context of the license as long as you like without paying any extra royalty. This is distinct from a royalty image (more common in big business) that requires you to pay a license fee for each release, or based on a number of printings, distributions, or website analytics. Royalty-free images are generally lower cost than other paid licenses, but also tend to be much higher quality images than you will find in the public domain. Many websites sell access to royalty free images.

Rights Managed

Rights Managed images are what you should look for if you want exclusivity. They tend to have higher costs than royalty free, but are more open to niche and exclusive uses. You might consider this type of image if you want to use the image in a logo (which some CC and Royalty Free do not allow), or if you do not want to see anyone else on the Internet using that image anywhere else. Some of the sites you can purchase Royalty Free images have an exclusivity option for Rights Managed allowing you to pay extra to de-list the image for sale to future users.

Where to Source Images

If you are an avid photographer, you can always shoot the images yourself! As the photographer, you have full ownership of the images and can do with them what you want. The only restriction you will have with images you have snapped yourself is any people that are in those images. A publisher may require you to get a release form signed for any image that contains people. If you are merely running your blog and have permission from identifiable people, you can run with it (if it's OK with them). In my case I take a lot of nature photos (like the crocodile on the thumbnail to this post), and so I didn't have to find out any licensing issues since I own the photo.

If you are looking to keep your costs down, you should look into public domain sources for images. The three I use most often are pixabay.com, pexels.com, and free-images.com. All these sites contain a searchable trove of images (and some video) that are released in the public domain or CC0, allowing you to use them in your projects.

For Royalty Free and Rights Managed, I would look to Storyblocks.com, shutterstock.com, and istockphoto.com. These are all paid services, and they are the ones with a high reputation in the industry.