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How To's
Three Places to Find Perfect Pictures for Your Program
People often want to know where to find unique, stand-out photos to use in program marketing.
You know that people are visual and that eye-catching graphics are an essential part of grabbing someone’s attention. Well-created images motivate and inspire us to make decisions, as do the words that accompany them, calling us to action.
Having high-quality materials may seem out of reach, even though you know that your program enrollment would benefit from them.
Fortunately, there are many resources for finding and creating captivating images you can use to market your classes. We’ve talked about using Google Photos to find royalty-free images you can use for free, but that’s far from the only game in town! Here we’ll cover three of our favorite cloud-based image libraries where you can find stunning photos and pictures you can use at no cost.
Images That Inspire
Pexels, Unsplash, and Pixabay each offer free and royalty-free images. All of them allow the downloading of photos at no cost, images can be modified and edited, and crediting the creator is not required. They all allow you to bookmark or like photos so you can download them later.
Pexels
Pexels’ thousands of images can be sorted by keyword or even by color, which is a neat way to approach photo selection. Pexels offers curated photo groups based on popular searches, which are helpful if you’re looking for a little visual inspiration. Photographers respond to regular theme challenges which help keep content fresh. Pexels also has a library of free videos for use in your projects.
Unsplash
“Make something awesome” is the motto of Unsplash, an open photography community with tens of millions of users. Billions of photos are viewed and downloaded per month. You can sort through their enormous library by keyword or by navigating suggested collections.
Pixabay
Pixabay offers copyright-free images and videos, which include illustrations and vector graphics. The selection is diverse in style and content. Pixabay has one of the most detailed and easy-to-use filters including, photo orientation, color, collection, category, and kind. While there are a lot of useful illustrations and photos, there’s also a lot of lower-quality photography and clip-arty pictures that you’ll need to sort through. (That said, if you can’t find it on Pixabay, you’ll have a hard time finding it anywhere for free.)
A Harmonious Trio
Each of these services has unique offerings and used together; you’ll surely be able to find a snappy image for every occasion. From the perfect shot to inspiration for a photo you take yourself, we hope that these will provide you with attractive, professional, and creative options to make your content stand out online!
Do you have a favorite “go-to” website for images for your program? We’d love to hear about it at monique@coursestorm.com!
Nic Lyons
Nic is skilled in scaling start-up edtech and education organizations to growth-stage success through innovative marketing. A former journalist and copywriter, Nic holds a postgraduate certificate in digital and print publishing from Columbia University School of Journalism's publishing course.