The importance of stock image sites for your newsletters

Stock image sites are essential for marketing your brand, business or blog. You want to make a good impression and win your subscribers over visually, right?

Then you need highly original content that makes you stand out from the competition.

Carefully crafted visual content is key to establishing the image of your company or business. Backgrounds, infographics, illustrations, cards, memes… help brands build a visual identity around themselves, so users can recognize them and tell them apart from the competition.

With that in mind, there are many stock image sites on the market, both free and paid, where you are sure to find the perfect support to strengthen your brand image.

So if you need professional photos but don’t have the budget to hire a photographer, keep reading, because I’m going to share several important details about the different stock image sites out there.

What is a stock image site?

A stock image site is a website where you can buy and download royalty-free photos, or photos licensed for non-commercial use, to use in your articles, your website design, your social media creatives and, of course, the images in your newsletters.

As I mentioned, there are two types of stock image sites: free and paid. Paid sites usually work with different pricing plans or subscriptions, which means you can download a certain number of photos depending on the plan you have signed up for. Free sites usually offer unlimited downloads, although the quality of their material is not as high as that of a paid site, which is worth pointing out.

As for photo sizes, they are usually available in several options: small, medium, large, web or vector (in .psd or .ai), so you can work with them according to your needs.

Another important point is the types of material you can download from a stock image site. Besides photos, they usually offer other resources too, such as videos, GIFs, icons or freebies.

What stock image sites are there?

Below, I’m going to review several stock image sites available online, grouped by the type of content they offer.

Free stock image sites

First, let’s look at free stock image sites, the ones that don’t charge anything for using and downloading their graphic material.

I’d like to mention three fairly well-known ones: Pixabay, Freepik and Unsplash.

Pixabay

Pixabay offers more than 940,000 high-quality resources grouped into three categories: photos, vectors and illustrations.

All of its resources are copyright-free under the Creative Commons CC0 license, which means you can download, modify, distribute and use them free of charge for any purpose, even commercial, with no attribution required.

Freepik

Freepik is one of the best-known search engines for vectors, images, PSD files and icons.

On its platform you can find content of different types and formats: backgrounds, logos, cards, infographics, banners, patterns, brochures, frames and posters, among others.

Freepik’s resources are known for their creative, colorful design, and their quality always delivers highly visual results.

Finally, it’s worth mentioning that the platform comes in two versions: a free one for certain resources and a paid one, which requires registration, with unlimited access to its designs.

Unsplash

Founded in 2013, Unsplash has become a community of high-quality photos. Its images are copyright-free under a Creative Commons license and free to download.

Besides its beautiful photos, the platform stands out for its image collections, which group several resources on the same theme.

Pexels

Pexels offers free photos and videos that you can use for commercial purposes without crediting the author. It’s a good alternative to Unsplash if you’re also looking for video.

Paid

Now that you know some of the free stock image sites, it’s time to step it up and move on to the paid ones.

Here are some of the best known:

123RF

123RF has more than 77 million royalty-free images. It also has other sections with its own content, such as videos, icons, banners, vectors, infographics and audio.

It mainly stands out for the following features:

1. It has a search engine that lets you find resources by keyword. It also lets you upload any image from your computer to easily find similar material.
2. It also includes its own image editor, so you can edit your images before downloading them.
3. The speed and security of its image downloads are a plus for this site.

As for plans and pricing, it offers several options: download packs (5 or 25 images), subscription plans (monthly or yearly) and credit-based image purchases (20, 40, 90, 200, etc.).

Shutterstock

Shutterstock offers more than 125 million resources: images, video clips, audio, icons, vectors and illustrations.

Its material is organized by theme: abstract, animals, nature, beauty, fashion, business, sports, etc.

As for pricing, it has three different plans: basic, professional and team.

Adobe Stock

Fotolia used to be Adobe’s stock image site. It closed in 2019 and its images moved to Adobe Stock, which is now Adobe’s paid stock image site.

It integrates with Photoshop, Illustrator and the rest of Adobe’s software, and works with a monthly subscription or credit packs.

iStock

iStock is Getty Images’ more affordable stock image site. It has a cheaper basic collection and an exclusive one, and works with a subscription or credits.

Other sites: videos, GIFs and audio

Besides the stock image sites I’ve just mentioned, there are others online where you can find different resources, such as videos, GIFs and audio.

1. Sites for finding videos. Some sites for finding free, royalty-free HD videos are: Mazwai, VideoHive, Coverr, Life of vids, Videvo, Videezy and Distill.
2. Sites for finding GIFs. The best known of all is Giphy, but there are others too, such as The gif collector, Vaya gif and Tumblr.
3. Sites for finding audio. Some resource sites for finding high-quality audio are: Jamendo, SoundBible, FlashKit and Free Music Archive.

Image licenses: what you can do with each one

Just because an image is on a stock site doesn’t mean you can use it however you like. Each site has its own license, and it’s a good idea to read it before downloading.

• Public domain or CC0: you can use it for free, modify it and use it for commercial purposes without crediting the author.
• Royalty-free: you pay once, or through your subscription, and use it as many times as you like without paying more. It doesn’t mean it’s free.
• Attribution required: it’s free, but you have to credit the author or the site wherever you use it.
• Editorial use: only for news or informational articles. It can’t be used in advertising or in commercial emails.

A tip: save the link to every image you download, along with its license. If anyone asks where you got it, you’ll have the answer at hand.

Some recommendations for using stock image sites

Although stock image sites are a very useful resource, you should keep a few things in mind before using them:

1. Don’t overuse them. The truth is that their images aren’t entirely “real”. In other words, if you have a company and you put a stock image in the “about us” section of your website, the result won’t feel as real and approachable as uploading a photo of your whole team.
2. Always keep the same visual style. If you decide to use stock images for the photos on your website or blog, my advice is to always use the same type of photo so you keep a consistent visual style.
3. Give the images a personal touch. To make the images look less “unreal”, here are a few tips: apply a filter or effect in Photoshop with your brand colors, add a watermark or place your logo on them.

How to prepare an image so it’s lightweight enough to upload to a newsletter

When working with images for your website or blog, and also when you include them in your newsletters, I always recommend using high-quality material. Remember that images help you catch the attention of users who visit your website, and what you want is to leave a lasting impression.

So the best option is to use high-quality images, but their big drawback is their large file size and how long they take to load.

That’s why you should prepare your images before uploading them to your website and your newsletters, to reduce their size while keeping their quality.

Below, I’m going to list a series of tools and resources that will help you compress your images, making them perfect for email.

Photoshop

If you use Adobe Photoshop to work on your images, you should know there is an option to save them for the web, that is, with the resolution needed for the size you want, but with a smaller file size.

Here’s how to use “Save for Web” in Photoshop:

1. Open the image from your computer. In the “File” menu at the top, select “Save for Web” or press the following key combination: Alt + Shift + Ctrl + S.
2. A window then opens where you can choose some settings for saving your image: file name, format (.jpg, .png, .gif), colors or size. Size is one of the most important.
3. So, for the image size, you should set a width of no more than 600px if you need it for your newsletter, and 900 or 1000px if you’re uploading it to your website or blog. My advice is to adapt these measurements to your specific needs. When you set the width, the height changes automatically.
4. Now that your image is optimized the way you want, it’s time to save it to your computer.

Compressor.io

Compressor.io is an online tool that lets you compress and optimize your images before uploading them to a website, a blog or a newsletter.

It supports four different formats (JPEG, PNG, GIF and SVG) and two different compression types.

It’s very easy to use. To compress your photos, follow these steps:

1. First, click the “Try it!” button, and a page like this one will appear.
2. Here, select the image you want to optimize from your computer; it is uploaded and compressed automatically.
3. Once the process is finished, you’ll see the size of the image before and after optimization. Finally, click the “Download your file” button and save the photo. If you want to compress more images, just click “Compress another picture”.

Smush

If you use WordPress as the CMS for your website, I recommend installing this free plugin.

Smush resizes, optimizes and compresses all your images without losing quality.

In terms of features, it lets you optimize both the images already hosted on your website and the ones you upload after installing it. Once they’re compressed, you can add them to your newsletters.

Jose Argudo

CMO at Mailrelay. Writes about email marketing, copywriting, and conversion for small businesses and entrepreneurs.

More articles by Jose · LinkedIn