Sunday, March 9, 2014

Getty Images--GET Them!!!

Recently I heard great news about royalty free images that people can use in blogs, websites, and presentations. I really do love photography and infographics, and digital literacy is a special interest of mine. I went to the Getty collection (http://www.gettyimages.com/) and registered to be a user. This is also free. I took a look at the collection, doing several searches, and became even more excited. I found lots of images that I could have used in past projects. There was one small problem. I was not sure how to get an image for free. If you click on a particular picture, a window pops up that offers pricing information on the right. The picture is watermarked so you cannot just copy paste from that preview. That was where I hit a wall. I knew I was overlooking something but could not figure out what. Then yesterday I saw this helpful blog entry via Facebook, thanks to Georgia Wells: http://blogs.wsj.com/personal-technology/2014/03/05/gettys-images-are-now-free-for-twitter-tumblr-and-personal-blogs/?mod=ST1
I knew I was missing something that was probably easy, and sure enough what I was not noticing was that BELOW the picture there was this symbol: < >
That of course should have clued me in to the fact that I could click on it and get the html code needed to insert the picture. That was my missing piece of the puzzle. Now I have a super resource for images for presentations, etc. I will still use Creative Commons and morguefile, but it's great to have this option both because of the ease and also because of the rich collection of images. Here is one I may use in an upcoming presentation:



And here's another great plus...Getty nicely puts attribution right below the image for you! If you want to have students add a formal citation you can, but I would say for many uses this is fine and much better than lack of any sort of citation which is too often the case. Give it a try!