Sourcing photos and videos for your website is important – images are powerful drivers of opinion and action after all! In an ideal world (read ideal budget) you should be taking original pictures that lend credibility and personality to your brand.
But if your current budget doesn’t allow for that, you’ll be searching stock images for things that represent YOU. And so will lots of other people using the same tools. It might be time to broaden your search!
When you get to editing the images and compressing for a fast loading website, you’re probably never going to beat Photoshop (subscription ~HKD70/month) but you’ll need to learn it too! I’ve listed some online tools here that can help.
Free Image & Videos
All of these free stock image sources have something worth looking into – I’ve focused on those with good business and design images. This time I also did a simple test to search “asian woman” and see what came up first…seemed like a good barometer on diversity and might give you an initial impression on tone.
Here are some other stock image providers that do things a little differently…
And a few for the Vintage lovers…
- New Old Stock
- RawPixel Public Domain – They have made free to the public some wonderful antique illustrations
Online Editing & Compression Tools
If you have downloaded a lovely free image from one of those sources above you probably have an image that’s way too big. If you wanted to cover your entire website’s homepage screen you would be aiming at 1920×1080 pixels and <150kb. If you don’t have Photoshop I have something that will work to both resize and compress with very good results!
Meet Squoosh
Which just compressed and resized my photo from 4070×2728 5.6mb to 1400×938 94kb beautifully!
Squoosh >Next you will probably want to quickly convert that image into the right sizes for social media…and there’s a great tool for that too!
Meet Promo's Image Resizer
Here’s my LinkedIn image at 1200×628. You can reposition each one before downloading if needed.
Image Resizer >
