When I look for images for professional communications, I usually look on stock photography sites like Getty Images, Corbis, even Shutterstock (for anything but portraits). But you know, today, I searched in Google images again and it wasn’t pretty. When looking for a “team of workers” (yes, I know) I found so many wrong, dubious, completely irrelevant images. A picture of naked team workers (posing to boost morale of the team), one of Mr T, a french pit bull with hair extensions…
If however I would find a suitable image on via Google Images, I’m not sure I’d be able to use it because of copyrights. How do you find the owner of an image posted on the web (loose from any personal Facebook/Flickr/DeviantART/… account)? I have been contacting people in the past years about the use of their images. Most of the time, people are very happy to allow you to use them for a token amount of money. With the prices of the big stock photography site, you shouldn’t hesitate if it’s the image you really want.
On the other side, it made me wish Corbis and the likes had a ‘snapshot’ library for those day to day, good but not that great images. Badly framed, underlit/overlit, wrong composition, wrong people… Ok, Flickr might be a better place to find those but their search engine is nowhere compared to that of Getty for example (search on viewpoint, number of people, location, …)
To find what I want, I might have to go shoot those snapshots myself. Ah well.
There’s worse things in the world, like some spam e-mail claiming I shouldn’t waist time at University… I wonder why.