Tip: Where To Find Free Images For Your Website or Blog

Where can you find free images for your website or blog? This tip shows you where! 

Want an Apple image for free?

Most of these sites selected allow the use of the images for many purposes (including on your website or blog as well as some commercial purposes) without attribution, but the policy can differ from image to image, so do check carefully before you use! Here’s the list of top 6 places to get your free images: 

1) Stock.xchng (www.sxc.hu)

 This is one of the largest and most popular sites, with almost 400,000 images online. The images are of high quality and include illustrations and vectors for free. You can check out their image use policy. One thing to note – you will have to sign up (it’s a simple process) in order to download the images.
Assessment: One of the best!

2) Morguefile

This site was set up in 1996 and is “by creatives for creatives”. The images now number more than 260,000. They are mostly of high quality and they are free too! There’s also a search function which can come in useful. You can check out the Morguefile license. One good thing is that you do not need to register in order to download any image.
Assessment: One of the best!

3) Pixabay

This is another site with thousands of high-quality images. These are all free to use personally and commercially without attribution, according to the terms of use). You also do not need to register to download any image. The design of the site is also very clean and easy to use.
Assessment: Another one of the best!

4) Freerange Stock

This site was formed with the goal to “provide quality stock photos for commercial and non-commercial use. For free.” The images are either shot by Freerange themselves, from their archives or contributed by their community. The images also go through processing (e.g. sharpening, colour correcting, cropping, keywording), so the quality of the images is very high. This makes the collection slightly smaller, but it’s still sizable (and of very high quality!) One thing to note – you will have to sign up (it’s a simple process) in order to download the images. Check out their license.
Assessment: A great site.

5) Pixel Perfect Digital

Pixel Perfect Digital is a site with some photography news, but one of the main attractions is that it has a stock photo collection. You can use the images on your websites, according to the terms of use. The collection (at around 16,000 images) is a little smaller than the others, but the images are good quality ones.
Assessment: A good site.

6) US Government image collections

While most of the photos and images are in the public domain and may be used and reproduced without permission or fee, some photos and images may be protected by license. In addition, the government agencies do ask for attribution when using the images – for example, the photolibrary of the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and NASA, so use with care.
Assessment: An amazingly rich collection, but check license before use.

Tip: How To Make Free Maps For Your Blog or Website

How do you make a world map (or regional / country maps) with data that you can use on your blog or website? Google Maps is obviously one tool that can be used, but I do not like the interface and the colours. The customization of features is also somewhat limited. This tip shows you some good tools (online and offline) that you can use to generate and customize such maps.

1) Gunn Interactive

This is a very good tool to depict your data on a world map. You can load your own data by pasting it into the site (e.g. by copying from an Excel file or similar formats). You can then edit data (you have to double-check the country name as it may not match the exact country name listed in the site).

This tool is quite easily customized – you can set the appearance, change the colours corresponding to data values, whether to display the key / legend, whether to show country labels and finally whether to save as JPG or PNG. One downside, though, is that you cannot save the data loaded for the next use.

It is free and easy to use, and shared under the Creative Commons - you are free to share and generate derivative works, with attribution by providing a link to the site. See the examples produced by this tool - the Christian map, Muslim map and Freedom map.

2) freemap.jp

Africa map, random countries

This is another site with a number of editable maps – including a world map and regional maps. You can choose to highlight different countries with different colours, whether to show the coast lines, borders or country names, among other things. [The tool seems to be able to take in and depict data by each country, but this feature does not seem to work.] Similar to the previous tool, you can save the map as a PNG file, but you cannot save the settings for future use.

This site also has a number of blank maps for download - including world maps, regional maps as well as country maps. These maps are free, but the site does not specify any specific sharing arrangements. 

3) StatPlanet

StatPlanet is a free software for creating interactive maps (and graphs) that are customizable. You need to download and install it, and load your data in the form of Excel files. It takes a bit of time to get used to initially, so it is less straightforward than the first two tools. It is more powerful though, and it is relatively easy to use once you are used to it. See an example (also in the graphic here) produced by this tool - the Crime Statistics(homicide rates) map.

4) Presentation Magazine

This site provides a series of editable vector maps in the form of powerpoint templates. There are world maps, regional maps as well as country maps (see for example the US map on the right). These are all free for use, but be sure to check the website and templates for detailed terms. One thing to note is that some of the maps may have missing information (e.g. country borders, etc), but on the whole it is a good tool to use if you do not need 100% accuracy.

5) Other vector maps

Wikipedia World Map

Here are some other resources where you can get free vector maps (basically they are just graphics), but do note the terms and conditions of use.

• Wikipedia World Map (this is in the public domain)
• Vecteezy (this has a good number of maps, but do note the terms of use)

6) US Geological Survey

Credit: U.S. Geological Survey

This form-based simple map generator (called Map-It) is a slightly different tool from the ones above. It takes longitude / latitude pairs as input and plots them on a map along with land/sea and political boundaries. You can set the map bounds about 10% larger than the bounds of the entered data points. 

The good thing about this tool is that you can generate a map of any region in the world, as long as you have the longitude and latitude (which you can get from places such as here). 

The downside of this tool is that you need to figure out all the longitude and latitude yourself (though they provide you the numbers if you need to plot the whole world). Another downside is that the colours are fixed, and you cannot change them. The tool is free to use, but do check out their terms of use (e.g. you have to credit USGS).

Tip: How To Include Sitemap Gadget on Your Blog

How can you include a sitemap gadget (listing all your posts by date) on your Blogger blog? See for example the sitemap gadget on the right side of this blog, though this isn't exactly the same as the one you will get from the steps below.

1) Go to the website: http://itde.vccs.edu/rss2js/build.php

2) Enter the fields required as follows:


URL Enter the web address of the RSS Feed
http://graphtheworld.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?start-index=1&max-results=999
[Replace the blog name with your own blog name. This gives up to 1000 results]


Number of items to display. Enter the number of items to be displayed (enter 0 to show all available)
[Enter desired number, e.g. 999. Do not leave it as "0" - it doesn't work.]

Enter other fields, as required.

3) Click "Preview". If the feed of the sitemap comes up, then click on "Generate Javascript".

4) If you need specific styles, you can also click on the style tool to customize.

5) Copy and paste Javascript into the a Html/Javascript gadget on your blogger.

That's all! It's quite simple, isn't it?