The Web is flooded with million images. Try Google image search or my favorite Picsearch.com and know what I mean. You are tempted to grab the best images and use it for your Business websites. And of course you can do it. Just right-click and save these images. They look so great on your websites. But as you can guess you can not do it or you can but on your own risk. A joke about Getty images - “they have three employees and two hundred lawyers” shows what you can expect – a big lawsuit against you or a nasty email with a request to delete the images you love so much from you website immediately. Why? Images are commodity on the Web. A right image at a right place and at a right time can bring thousands people to your websites. Thousands- millions users and page views; this is exactly what most (if not all) website’s owners are dreaming about.
The beauty of the Web is that you have a choice. There are images on the web that cost a fortune and you should pay, there are images that cost much less and there are free images. Rights-Managed Images: Images you purchase for a specific purpose at a specific price (think renting the photo or paying to borrow the image). The price of the picture is usually determined by how you want to use the picture (on the web, in print, etc.). The plus side to using a rights-managed photo is that you will most likely NOT see anyone else using the same photo (or model) promoting another product. The downside is of course the price; rights managed photos can cost you double (even triple) of what royalty-free runs.
Royalty-Free Images: Images purchased outright, either as single images or on disc volumes in bulk, and can be used any way you want, with certain restrictions. Pricing for royalty-free images is usually decided by the size of file you want to purchase; the larger the file (meaning, the better the quality of the image), the higher the price. The good news with royalty-free images is that if you are using them for the web (on websites, advertisements, etc.), you can use the smaller files, thus saving yourself a lot of money. For printing purposes however, you will need to buy the larger file sizes. And typically royalty-free images can be used however you like.
