Copyright infringement can be a serious matter for government entities like Neighborhood Councils. This article is Part 2 in a series on how to avoid these issues when finding photos for your Council’s outreach materials.
Professional photos make your website, social media and flyers look more polished, which in turn makes your Council look more credible and competent.
However, professional images can also be very expensive. Many image banks, like Getty Images or Shutterstock, charge a fee for using their images. This is even surprisingly true of photo collections like those belonging to the Los Angeles Public Library.
And non-profit, government organizations like Neighborhood Councils are not exempt from paying these charges. For example, it would cost about $75-100 per use for a Neighborhood Council to use a single image from the LA Public Library’s archives in a project like a brochure or a presentation. LAPL has some beautiful images of LA life that are exclusive to their collection, so the fees may be worth it for a special project, but the cost is probably harder to justify for a simpler item like an event invite for your Facebook page.
Fortunately, there are some excellent online resources for finding high-quality, royalty-free images that you can use in your web and printed outreach without paying fees.
However, it’s important to remember that “royalty-free” does not equal “attribution-free.” Giving photo credit is still often required by the licenses of images that may be reused without paying fees. In addition, most licenses specify the details that a photo’s credit must contain, and how it must be worded. Creative Commons images, for example, require attribution unless they are licensed as public domain works under Creative Commons license CC0 (No Rights Reserved.)
How to cite Creative Commons images will be covered in depth in a future article. For now, it’s important to just note that while many of the images on Wikimedia or Flickr have Creative Commons licenses, most still require photo credit. In addition, many of these have more extensive requirements, like citing the license, and extending that licensing to any works you create using that image.
Giving a properly detailed and formatted photo credit can take up valuable time and space when you’re trying to do something simple or short like a social media post, and it can be difficult to attribute images on some items, like printed banners.
In situations like these, it may be best to find images on a site like Pexels or Pixabay, which exclusively carry royalty-free images that may be used without attribution. Both sites have great images of Los Angeles and its neighborhoods, like the image of the Hollywood sign at the top of this article, which comes via Unsplash.com on Pexels.
TIP: use regional keywords like “Hollywood” to find images of your neighborhood when searching collections like Pexels or Pixabay
TIP: one easy way to avoid copyright infringement is to always give photo credit whenever and wherever you can – even if you think it is not required.
Want another source for high-quality free images? Check out Part 1 of this series, about the beautiful historical photos available through the Library of Congress’ collection of over 30,000 images on Flickr.
