Today, all small business owners, service providers, and freelancers have one thing in common. They all have their own business or portfolio websites. Introduction of WordPress and various other publishing platforms made it super easy for any average Joe to have his business or portfolio website on the fly. While it’s not hard to build a website or blog these days to showcase your products or services, there are few details that demand in depth knowledge.
We all know content is the king. But that’s not the main reason we see 1500+ words articles on blog posts these days. So why blog posts these days changed from few hundred words few years ago to 1500+ words now? It is the latest Google algorithm which bloggers are adapting to. Since Google algorithm favors long content along with wide range of media in the post, small business owners and service providers are keeping this in mind while crafting their site content.
However, while writing few pages long content to make Google happy is not too hard to do, it is the media that throws some people out.
Here are some challenges small business owners face while adding images on their sites or blogs:
- Finding royalty free images
- Finding image in proper category
- Finding image in right size
- Editing or resizing the images to suit the page layout
On this article, we will address these issues and by the time you are done reading this article, you will be a master in finding royalty free images online as well as on how to edit and resize them using free tools that you already have on your laptop or PC.
Where and How to Find Royalty Free Images Online
There are various sites where you can find royalty free images. For the purpose of this article and to keep things simple as well as fruitful, we will use Flickr to find these images we all need for our blogposts.
Flickr is an online image management and image sharing website where you can find ton of images practically across all topics. To start this tutorial, let’s head over to flickr.com and find our image we need first.
Let’s say you are a photographer and working on writing a blogpost on the topic Depth of Field. You will need some images to accompany your blogpost on this topic. We will search for the term “depth of field” in the flickr search box to find our images.
At this point, you will see virtually millions of images you can pick from. We will make the selecting process most efficient by using filters to find royalty free or creative commons images that suits the style of our blog page.
So what is creative commons? It is a public copywrite license that allows free distribution so by selecting creative commons in the filter, you can find images you can freely use for your need.
At this stage, you will select “all creative commons” under “any license” drop down at the top left-hand site of the page.
We will select one more filter to make it lot easier for us to find the right size picture that will be easier for us to edit. Select advanced, then under orientation, select from available options such as horizontal, vertical, square, landscape, etc. We will select only the first option. We will use 600 px X 300 px edited size in this demonstration so selecting this image size will be helpful for us.
At this point you are ready to select an image that you like and click that to go to the download page. On the bottom right corner of the download page, click on the down arrow to select the image size you wish to download. Since we are using 600 px X 300 px images for our article, let’s select the size that closely matches our image requirement which is Medium 800 x 571 px size. So let’s select that size and download our image.
Now that we have an image downloaded, we are ready to edit/resize our image to make it 600 px X 300 px size WITHOUT losing the image quality.
For this step, we will use two different apps which are both available for free on any windows desktop or PC. These are Paint and Pain 3D. We will first open the image with Paint and resize it to 600 px horizontal maintaining aspect ratio.
Once that’s done, save the resized image. You will notice that the image is 600 px horizontal but the vertical is not 300 px which is what we need. To maintain the original quality of the image, we need to select the “maintain aspect ratio” option. Once this image is saved with 600 px horizontal, we will now use Paint 3D to keep it at 600 px horizontal but resize the vertical to 300 px.
Open the image with paint 3D, select crop and resize the image vertically by reducing the size form top and bottom using your mouse till you see the size being 600 x 300.
Once you see the desired result, now it’s time to save your masterpiece. Below is the final result of the image now we can use on our website and blog with our desired size without compromising the quality.
The image size 600 px X 300 px used here is for demonstration purposes. You can select any size you want to suit your page layout.
Above is the finished output. Happy Editing!
Author Bio: Anwar Alam is the founder and president of Joolo Media. He gained wealth of knowledge managing various online businesses over the course of last two decades. His company Joolo Media has been providing eCommerce photo editing services to commercial photographers, eCommerce companies and marketing agencies since 2014.