Amanda recalls a time when using online images for her marketing content almost caused her firm some legal woes.
Sometimes procuring online content to be featured in your marketing can be more trouble than what it’s worth. However, utilizing free websites that specialize in images, sounds, backgrounds and etc can help push your creative content to a new level.
In this week’s #FollowAttorneyAmanda, Amanda talks about what free online resources she utilizes to create creative content for her firm.
Follow this video and learn a few sites that will help your firm’s content.
Video Transcript
Hi, I’m attorney Amanda Shaffer. Today we’re going to talk about some resources I found online that have been really helpful. And the best part is, is most of them are free. So one of the things that my law partner, Aaron, and I talked about when we made our first – when I was making our first website, he made the first one before I joined him and then I already did it like years later. We had to be very careful with copyright law. Apparently if you – Getty images, they go after everybody. So Aaron had used something – used a photo, not realizing it was a Getty image and he had to take it down and they were threatening to sue and everything. So in order to avoid that the way you go about it is to either use your pictures, which I try to take pictures and videos and stuff on my own that I think I might use later on.
So far, I’ve not used it. I have some great photos of the city and stuff; Statute of Liberty. I’ve used some of my photos, none of my – I do time-lapse videos. Anyways, so one way is to do it yourself. Another way is to find either creative comments, pictures, videos – this goes to fonts, icons, sound effects, all of that or to do public domain. So I had, especially when you don’t have much of a budget, that’s what you’re going to look for. For the creative comments, you just have to be careful because you might have to attribute or pay – cite the artist or whatever, which is fine, but sometimes it’s hard to do. Or if you’re saving pictures for later, you don’t always remember.
So on allthefreestock.com, I came across this website a while ago. It has everything. It has free stock photos, like mock-ups, which I think are kind of like templates; photos, sorry, videos, sound, icons. Icons8.com is fantastic. As long as you register, you can like to download any icon possible in any color. And they have so many and they’re always adding more. So I found that from allthefreestock.com. With the stock photos, most of the stock photos you see on our website were ones that I got from allthefreestock.com. Now just like I mentioned when we talked about Canva that I can get lost in it, you can also get lost in all the free stock. There are so many; they just keep adding on. But it is a great tool to use and it’s helped because I’ve saved a lot of money, not having to pay royalties for photos and whatever.
But ever since it started using canva.com, which I do pay for, they have so many photos themselves and elements, which are like – some of them are like icons that I haven’t had to go to allthefreestock.com, but it’s always an option if I need it. I always have to make sure that it is a photo that I don’t have to pay attribution to, because there’s just – you don’t want to, especially when you have so many things to deal with, the last thing you want to deal with is like Getty images telling you they’re going to sue you if you don’t remove something and they check that. Some people just check. So it could be like for sometimes for graphics, it could take me a long time to search, because I don’t want to pay money, but I’ve not found something eventually. If I can’t find it on any of the allthefreestock.com photos, because all the free stock is a website that links to other sites. So basically it gathers all the public domain and creates common-like photos in one spot. Some of them are multi-site searches that it has. If I can’t find it there, and sometimes you can’t, then I go to Google, I type in the public domain, as the type of image or creative comments type of image.
There is a way to search in Google images for creative comments only, or public domain only, but I have found that the results aren’t great. And you’re much better with allthefreestock.com because a lot of the websites – you have to be careful though. A lot of the websites have also paid photos. So you have to be careful if the boxes are checked. Other than that, as I said, it’s fantastic. You just don’t want to accidentally end up having to pay a lot of money for photos that you thought were free because you probably can get something pretty equivalent for free. Well, that is all today for #FollowAttorneyAmanda. See you next time.
