Two Inexpensive Ways to Add Images to Your Articles

 

 

I found gold today, and I had to share.

Whether you are creating a blog post or posting an article on JDSupra, you should include one or more images. According to some studies, adding an image increases readership by as much as 94%. When I add an image to a JDSupra posting, it pops off the page and screams “read me” instead of just sitting there, looking like a boring legal article.

Trouble is, stock photo images can be expensive. I used to use a service called Shutterstock, which charged $10 per image, unless you pay $199 per month, which gets you up to 25 images per day. That’s crazy talk. On one occasion, I needed a large image to use as a banner across a blog I was creating. I found the perfect image, and while Shutterstock warned me it was a premium image and would cost more than the usual $10, I thought “how much more can it cost?” and bought it anyway.

I’ll tell you how much more it can cost — $65! I paid $75 for a single image. I die a little inside every time I log onto that blog and see the $75 image.

Adobe Stock (rest in peace Dollar Photo Club)

Do you see the image at the top of this article? Isn’t that a great image? Doesn’t it just make you feel good? I used it today in an article where I was bragging about some recent victories. I thought it was the perfect image to show a law firm celebrating a victory.

Guess how much I paid for that image. One single, solitary dollar.

[Update] When I originally wrote and posted this article, at this point I talked about the photo service I was using — Dollar Photo Club (“DPC”). DPC was $99 per year, and entitled you to download 99 images during that year. If you went over 99 images, the extras were just $1 each. Unlike many stock photo services, the price remained $1 regardless of the image size. For blog articles and such, you don’t need massive 5168 x 3445 images, but if I’m going to buy an image, I prefer to download the largest image available for my library, and then reduce it for the blog post. Other services may charge $9 for a small image but, say, $150 for the same image in a larger size.

Unfortunately, DPC must have been too good of a deal, because it closed down. But it went out in a classy manner, allowing all its members to switch to the Adobe Stock photo service for $9.99 per month (1/3 the usual price), while at the same time receiving a credit for all unused image credits from Dollar Photo Club.

But let’s talk about what you will pay if you sign up for Adobe Stock, not having been a DPC member. Adobe Stock is $29.99 per month if you pay for the year; that jumps to a whopping $49.99 per month on a monthly plan. For that price, you get ten images per month, you can rollover up to 120 unused images. At the annual price, that obviously translates to $3 per image, and that is what you will pay per image if you go over the allotted ten per month. I hate adding any costs to my firm’s overhead, and you no doubt feel the same way, so $30 per month might sting a little, but $3 per image is crazy cheap as compared to most stock photo services. The first month is free, if you want to give it a try. Go to Adobe Stock (not an affiliate link).

Admittedly, $3 per image is not as good as the $1 per image I was originally able to report, and I will update this article again if I find another great deal like that, but Adobe Stock is a great option for now. You may be thinking that you won’t download ten images per month, but at just $3 per image, you are going to be very generous with your use of images.

To make sure I could recommend Adobe Stock, I took the time to throw 20 different search terms at it, to see how many quality images it would deliver. In all cases, I was met with hundreds if not thousands of images, of such quality that I would have to make some hard choices on which image to download. I anticipated that the number of available images from Adobe Stock would be greater than what was available from DPC, and my tests confirmed my suspicion. For example, I searched for “angry worker” and received 6,677 images to chose from on DPC, and over 10,200 on Adobe Stock. A search for “victory high five” yielded the image you see above, and 151 others.

See that uplifting picture to the left? That came from the search “happy attorney”. He’s happy because he just found out he can get stock photos for $3.

This is very exciting. At $10 per image on Shutterstock, I found myself asking, “do I really want to add $10 to the cost of this blog post?” But at just $3 per image (still $1 for me for now), I can add images with impunity. In fact, I’m going to add another one just because I can. (See the big thumbs up AND “V” for victory below.)

Free Images

If $1 per photo is still too much for you, how about some free images? For a few months now, I’ve been using a WordPress plug-in called WP Inject.

After installing this plug-in on your WordPress site, it adds a box below the editing section. When you want to find and insert an image, you go to that box and type in a search term. WP Inject searches Flickr for images that people have agreed to make available at no charge. You can opt for two types of photos; with or without bylines. Apparently, some people are happy to make their photos available for free, knowing that their name will appear under the photo. Others don’t need that ego gratification.

Sometimes WP Insert turns up some really good images, but most of the time it is pretty sparse. A search for “happy attorney” gave no results, and even a far broader search for “attorney” only pulled up a few. My other concern with WP Inject is that you have no guarantee that the photos really are the property of the person offering them. You could be getting an email from the copyright police. Still, I understand the fear of commitment, even if it is for only 10 or 99 dollars, so give WP Inject a try.

Getty Images

If you go to gettyimages.com and search for an image, when you click on the image you will see the following text just below the image: </>. That is the embed symbol. If you are a registered user, you can click on that symbol, and you will be provided with an embed code. You paste that into the html on your blog, and the image is pulled in with source information. This is all FREE!

If you don’t mind all the source information, this can be another way to get free images. The images cannot be used for commercial purposes. I would consider a law firm blog to be commercial, but when I read the terms of use, I recall that the terms “commercial use” was in a more literal sense, as in selling the pictures or somehow using them to generate direct income. I concluded that you are permitted to use them on law firm blogs, but you’ll need to make your own determination. Here is what an embedded image looks like: