June 28, 2016 at 5:00 pm

@bestwriter no, the link you have provided here is not free. You can see the watermark of “shutterstock” which is proof enough that shutrstock has copyright on that image.</span>

• This reply was modified 8 years, 6 months ago by  suny.

June 29, 2016 at 1:39 am

@bestwriter To my knowledge, none of the Shutterstock images are free. There may, however, be some sort of free trial period when you sign up for the service. Any photo that appears on another site (like Pixabay) should be understood to be part of an ad for their paid service.

Regardless of your approach to writing or your goal in belonging to a site like LB, everyone must respect copyright law. It’s important that we all educate ourselves to click through all the way when performing an image search. This almost always makes it clear if the image is copyrighted or no.

June 29, 2016 at 4:55 am

@ruby3881 – What is the meaning of royalty free images?

June 29, 2016 at 10:17 am

@bestwriter  Shutterstock images are not free. You can search for images from pixabay or you can go to google advanced search and look for images which are free to use or share. Also make sure to give image credit in your posts.

June 29, 2016 at 10:54 am

@bestwriter Royalty free images are the ones you can use on your blog but with credit to them. The use of water marked ones or the ones which need annual or one time payment is serious infringement of copyright act. The site has to pay for being careless in case of approval of such content on their website.

June 29, 2016 at 10:57 am

@Ruby3881 There is no free trial period as such on shutterstock. You have to be a licencee user by paying an annual fee or pay per image as the case be. You have to pay according to size of the images as prescribed by them.

June 29, 2016 at 11:03 am

@shallo walia I am fully  aware of these rules but they do give free images to those who have an account with them.

In the process of uploading there could be stray cases when a rule is overlooked and this could happen even with those who are veteran writers.

June 29, 2016 at 11:19 am

@bestwriter They give you tool to delete the watermark too if you pay them annual/image fee.  Pixabay is one of their sister concern which generally carries first row of Shutterstock images with watermark but those images are not for free use.

By the way, you can become a member and upload your images and if they get selected you get a royalty for your work.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 5 months ago by  suny.

June 29, 2016 at 1:17 pm

@bestwriter A royalty is a payment that is made to an artist (an actor, musician, writer, photographer, etc.) when that artist’s work is used in a commercial project that earns money. It’s kind of like a sales commission, but instead of being based on the sale of a product or service, it is paid for the permission to use a copyrighted work. When you agree to pay royalties, you may be asked to pay a certain amount for each time the work is displayed or distributed. Or your royalty may be calculated as a percentage of your profits.

Royalty-free images are images that are not subject to this royalty or commission. With a service like Shutterstock, Dreamstime, iStockPhoto, etc., you will pay a flat licencing fee for permission to use a photo or other graphic. But you are not required to pay an additional royalty if your project earns you a profit.

@sunil “Royalty free images are the ones you can use on your blog but with credit to them.”

You are confusing “royalty-free” with  licenses based solely on attribution. Whether attribution is required has nothing whatsoever to do with an image being subject (or not subject) to royalties. “Royalty-free” is an expression generally associated with content that is paid for with a one-time licensing fee. There are no per-use or profit-based royalties charged. The licence may or may not require attribution, and this requirement may be applied differently according to how the image is used.

June 29, 2016 at 1:28 pm

@ruby3881 I will stick  to Wikimedia commons images where everything is crystal clear. For me pixabay is a chapter closed issue now.  I always used wikimedia commons images and that will be my choice and no other.

June 29, 2016 at 1:36 pm

@Ruby3881 When I mentioned royalty free here I had Pixabay in my mind because I won’t touch an image from shutterstock unless I am using them for a purpose (or someone is paying me for those images for his blog/article as I do ghostwriting sometimes too but in most case I leave the image part to author himself).

And permission to use Images and Videos on Pixabay are released under Creative Commons CCO. to the extent possible under law, members and uploaders of Pixabay have waived their copyright and related or neighboring rights to these Images and Videos. Therefore you are free to adapt and use them for commercial purposes without attributing the original author or source. Although it is not required but a link back to Pixabay is much appreciated but that is not mandatory or to be on the safe side just in case.

June 29, 2016 at 1:47 pm

@ bestwriter  I agree with you but with some difference

here is what is mentioned on every photo in Wikimedia/Wikimedia Commons 

But you can see that only if you go deeper and check details-

I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby publish it under the following license:

w:en:Creative Commons

attribution share alike This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

You are free:

to share – to copy, distribute and transmit the work

to remix – to adapt the work

Under the following conditions:

attribution – You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).

share alike – If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one.

June 29, 2016 at 1:48 pm

wow, lots of comments on shutterstock images and pixabay.

i use my own self taken photos with my smartphone or use wikipedia or pixabay images.

Of course, I do put in the source of images in all my posts, as you can see them

June 29, 2016 at 2:03 pm

@bestwriter Wikimedia was one of my favourite sources, some years ago. I still use them occasionally. I can see why you’d prefer them 🙂

@sunil Pixabay is a provider of public domain (and therefore free to use) images. It is not generally described as royalty-free because of the confusion with pay to use sites like Shutterstock. Pixabay’s description does reference the fact that there are no royalties to pay, but they focus much more on the images being “free of copyright.” And of course, no attribution is required because their images are released into the public domain under a CC0 waiver.

I mention this because it’s easy for newer writers to become confused when we use non-equivalent expressions as though they were synonymous.

June 29, 2016 at 2:27 pm

@peachpurple  I have enough images of my own to cater to the whole world  😀  Depending on what my blog is about I sometimes need to go on the Net to get suitable images.