If you’re wondering how to amplify the impression left by your magazine on its viewers, be sure to analyze the photographs you use to illustrate your articles. High-quality, relevant photographs not only encourage one to read an article, but also help to better consolidate its content, as readers often rely on the context.
This article will familiarize you with three resources of unique, free photographs that you can use in your magazine or blog. Seeing as Valentine’s Day is approaching, we’ve come up with a cool gift in the form of a package of unique, public domain photographs in the Valentine’s Day theme.
1. Compfight is an image search engine tailored to efficiently locate images for blogs, comps, inspiration, and research. Compflight makes a good use of the flickr API, but aren’t affiliated with flickr.
2. Wikimedia Commons is a media file repository making available public domain and freely-licensed educational media content (including images) to everyone, in their own language. It acts as a common repository for the various projects of the Wikimedia Foundation. The repository is created and maintained not by paid archivists, but by volunteers.
3. Unsplash It’s my favorite source of no-copyright pictures I really recommend to subscribe for. It’s as easy to use as its description: free 10 new photos every 10 days.
These resources have one thing in common – all of their content is user-generated. I recommend searching through Wikimedia contents as well as taking a look at The Library of Congress on Flickr, as one can really come across some excellent free photos there, which would be difficult to find anywhere else. I mean photographs illustrating various historical events.
Tip: Magazine publishers can use free-of-charge photographs for the purposes of quickly creating promotional free special issues related to various events. Just upload the special issue onto your PressPad panel as “Free Sample”.
The magazine will automatically appear in the Issuu.com network as well, so remember to link to your store in the PDF itself (the address of your publishing house’s store can be found with search engine.)
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Valentine’s Day photographs made available courtesy of “Patryk Morzonek Photography” under the Public Domain license.
Photographs of fruit and food compiled from Wikimedia contents under the Public Domain license
Photographs of people accessed on Flickr through The Library of Congress
Do you know any other sources of free-of-charge pictures suitable for magazine publishers for the purposes of illustrating articles and creating magazine covers? If so, let us know in the comments!
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