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Adobe InDesign CC - Essential Training

Where can I find free images & icons that I can use for my business

Daniel Walter Scott

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Introduction



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Hi there, in this video we're going to look at free images. By free, I mean commercial use, free. So you can use them for work and business. So this is the thing we looked at in the last video, called Adobe Stock. That costs around $10 to about $30 depending on the license you need. So let's look at free stuff, where there's no budget.

So Freeimages is probably one of the most popular. freeimages, with a ‘s’, dot com. In here I'm going to type in 'Flowers'. And you'll find a lot of good quality images. Now when you're using this site, you need to ignore all of these images because these are paid ones, they kind of come up over here as ads. That's how the site makes its money. And what you need to do over this side-- 'Relevancy' is fine, it's going to be good images, but I find I get better quality results if I get 'Most Downloaded'. It brings the ones to the top that have been downloaded the most. And I often find the quality can be better. In this case, maybe it's not as great but trust me, you'll find switching it from 'Relevancy' to 'Most Downloaded' often works.

And what you want to do is-- now, one of the things is that all the images size are a little bit different. Say you want this one here, you click on it, you'll see that it is a certain size. You can't get a massive one sometimes, sometimes they're a little bit smaller. You could download. You're going to have to sign up, it's free. You can see it is 1200 pixels across, not huge. But sign in and download, it's free to sign up. And that's a good place for free images.

There's another place you could go, let's go to Google, and let's type in 'Roses', let's go to 'Images'. Now you just can't pick any of these images. Why? Because you don't have a license to use them, but there is an option in here to search by images that have licenses to use commercially. And it's under 'Settings', you can see-- no, not under 'Settings', go to 'Tools' So I clicked on 'Images', clicked on 'Tools', and this says 'Usage Rights', and I can say, 'Labeled for reuse', or 'Reuse with modification'. This means that I can use it as it is. This means I can use it, but also go and doctor it in something like Photoshop. These ones here can be used if you're a non commercial user. So, maybe education or news. But more than likely, you probably only got one for commercial use, and I'm going to go to 'Labeled for reuse'. You'll find there's good quality stuff in here.  What you also might do, is go to, where it says 'Size', and say, "I want the large ones." Because I don't want to deal with low quality stuff. So, freeimages, or using Google Images to get commercial use stuff.

Now let's move on to Icons. Now icons, there is a lot online, of free stuff. Most of it is kind of junky clip art from the 90s, but I like this site here called Iconfinder. Because, let's say I need an icon for a leaf, and what I can do is, make sure I'm over the side here. By default, it doesn't have any of these things turned on, it's just because I've been working on this before. So I'm going to try and go back to how it is by default. So this is what it looks like, there's lots of them here.

Now, if you do want to pay for an icon, totally, help this site out, you can see the $ on an icon, that's fine. But let's say you're doing it on a super budget, let's go to 'Free'. And where it says 'License type', you want to pick this one here for commercial use, but with 'No back link'. This one here says 'Commercial use' but you have to add a link to the site somewhere in your document to say that that's where it came from, so I'm going to go to 'No back link'. And these are the little icons that I get to use for free commercial use. It's not as many.

There's different things. If I put in the word 'Home', I need a 'Home' icon, same commercial use, say it needs to be 'Any', it doesn't have to be 'Vector'. There is a lot to pick from. What I really like about Iconfinder is that often they're part of groups. Let's say that I decide-- let's say that I really like this icon here. I know I'm just picking randomly. That one. Terrible one. You can see, that's actually part of another group of icons. So probably not that great. Let's look at this one. Another terrible one, but you can see it's a group of other free to use commercial fonts. Commercial icons. So it means that, often if you're looking for one icon you'll need a group of them.

So that my friends is free images, and free icons. Let's move on to the next video.