603 – Great pics are available: Tom talks Free Images

Episode 603 – Free Images
[00:00:09] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with Episode 603 of Screw the Commute podcast. Got to talk about free images today. Now, this is an area where you have to be very careful because you can get sued if you don't do it correctly. But if you do it correctly, you can have millions of great images to use in your commercial projects, like your website, your ebooks, printed books, posters, and wherever else you need images, business cards, whatever. And we'll get into that in a minute. I hope you didn't miss Episode 602. That was Yuval Ackerman. She is an ethical email copywriting expert. Now, we had a few disagreements since I've sent out hundreds of millions of emails and never had any complaints. But generally we agreed on what is ethical and what isn't when it comes to email marketing. That was episode 602 and of course to hear that episode you go to screwthecommute.com, slash and then the episode number that was 602 and this is 603. I'm sure you're going to want to share this with your colleagues because this is talking about where you can get free images without getting sued. All right, make sure you pick up a copy of our automation e-book. It saved me millions of keystrokes and allows me to spend time with customers prospects and developing products and services rather than fighting with my computer.

[00:01:53] So pick your copy up, add screw the compucom slash, automate free. And while you're at it, pick up a copy of our podcast app. It's really commute slash app. That's app where you can put us on your cell phone and tablet and take us with you on the road. All right. Let's get into the main event now. If you're in business, the chances are pretty good. You need images. And if you just grab them from anywhere because you happen to like them, oh, boy. You are opening yourself up to massive copyright infringement lawsuits. There are law firms that their main business model is to sue you for copyright infringement and then settle out of court. I've had two people come to me over the years telling me they spent 40 $700 to settle one lawsuit for one image on an obscure blog post that that probably nobody even read. Another person spent 60 $300 for another image. I don't remember where it was used. See, images can be embedded with ownership data and they are searchable by these law firms to locate them. And then it's pretty easy to find you and threaten to sue you. I think copyright infringement can be some ungodly amount of money, like a quarter of $1,000,000 per occurrence. So you don't want to be in that thing. So what these people do is they write one letter and collect around 5000 bucks from you. Well, don't give them that chance. And that's what this episode is about. Now, first, I will note it's better to take your own photos and then you own the copyright, and you don't have to worry about using those images.

[00:03:45] You may need a model release from whoever is in the image with you, but other than that, you own the copyright. The only real worry you have is that other people steal them from you and use them. Use them. But I'd rather have that happen than. Oh, some pencil pushing scumbag. Let's call them a photo chasing attorney. I'd rather not have to give them 5000 bucks. And another thing I want to mention before I get into where you can get free photos is that there has been a big backlash in the past five years or so against the stock business photos with the obligatory Asian person and black person and maybe Indian person in the photo. Everybody knows these photos are BS and it sheds a bad light on your company. You'd be better off shooting a real photo of you working with a client, even if the photo wasn't perfect. And one more warning. You can't trust Google Images. They have filters that are totally untrustworthy. Well, what does that mean? Well, you might filter for, let's say, OC for commercial use. And the photo really isn't okay for commercial use. And then here comes your lawsuit. So trust me, Google isn't going to defend you in court. All right. Don't trust Google Images. All right. Now, this episode is about free images, but I will tell you about one paid place. I use pretty much every day and that's clipart.com.

[00:05:28] They have millions of photos, clip art and even cartoons. And I don't have to worry about any usage rights. I pay for the right to use those images. And they have lots of sales images too, like arrows and add to cart and guarantees and all that stuff. All right, let's get to the free stuff now. What I have to tell you is that just because the images are free in most cases, that doesn't mean you can do anything you want with them. Each place I talk about today will have some kind of rules you must follow. Now, most of the rules are really easy to comply with, but you should still follow them. For instance, one rule may be that you can't resell the image itself. And that's certainly fair. You got it for free from someone else's creative work, and now you're trying to sell it. Now this is different from using it on a book cover and selling your book. That's pretty much what is called commercial use. Another rule. Might be that you can't adapt the photo again. That's fair. Now, other photos and images may not have that restriction. One more role. May require you give photo credit and where you must put it. Now sometimes you might have a credit section in the front matter of a book. Some may require it. It's attached to the edge of the photo. Sometimes you see a little vertical. Tiny font. Photo. Credit. And some may even request credit, but it's not mandatory. You get to pick if you want to do it or not.

[00:07:18] At any rate, you must read the rules for any photo you choose, and the rules may be different for each image on the site you're getting the image from. Don't take chances with this. And no matter how much you love the image, if the rights granted don't match your plans on how you're going to use the image, you are putting yourself at risk of a lawsuit. Now there are ways to embed where you got the image in the photo. Now it's too deep to explain here, but any geek worth their salt can do that for you because you'll probably forget over time where you got the photo just in case. Oc So I told you about the paid service. I use clip clip art, but here's what I found recently called Pexels.com. You can see some of the images and they are beautiful images I used from this site on my college rip off quiz at IMTCVA.org/quiz, so make sure you check that out. They're beautiful. I was able to adapt and put text on them and everything. So here's a couple. Here's a bunch more places. And remember, you got to read the rules for each image that you would find at one of these places. And this first one actually has audio recordings. So it's wordpress.com. Wordpress.org/openverse. This is a new thing that's got all kinds of stuff. Creative common stuff, open verse. Another one that's well known is CreativeCommons.org.

[00:09:02] Org. And then Wikipedia has one commons.wikimedia.org slash wiki slash main underscore page. These are all going to be in your show notes. Another one is stock snap. Oh. I'll just read them off for you. Unsplash.com. Pixabay.com. Freeimages.com. Freedigitalphotos.Net. Stockvault.net. And then there's another clip art place that has a lot of transparent. Png's transparent means it's nice because the background of your site or wherever you're putting it shows through, and then the image is like floating on top of it. That's transparent PNG and that is high. H High clip art. Icom High clip art. So please share this episode because this is a pretty quick episode but very important stuff that you should know now. If you'd like help with this and all the thousands of other things you need to know to have a successful online business. Check out my mentor program. It's the longest running, most unique, most successful ever in the field of Internet digital marketing, and I triple dog dare anybody to put their program up against mine, and nobody will in these 25 years that's been operating successfully. So check it out at greatInternetmarketingtraining.com. And again, make sure you share this episode with any any of your colleagues, because it can keep him out of a lawsuit and give him access to millions and millions of great images to use in their commercial endeavors. All right. We'll catch you on the next episode. See you later.