Do not find images on google and use them on your websites or social media
I recently had a client submit a photo for their website and social media related to an upcoming event. The images looked just a bit… too perfect, so I asked him, “Just double checking – do you own this photo or did you find it online?”
He hadn’t given me the photo himself and had to ask his partner, so I took a minute to do an image search on google. I definitely don’t want my work associated with… well, theft.
So, the main message is: don’t do this.
If you’re not sure if an image is stolen, you can use Google to find out!
If you haven’t used Google image search, it is pretty nifty.
Using Google image search, you can upload an image to google to see if it appears elsewhere online – people are pretty bad about copying from Pinterest as well.
Just go to google.com and click on the image icon:
Then, upload the image you’d like to search for (you can also enter the image’s URL. I found a pretty image and searched online for it:
Upload your image and look at the search results on the right. Do any of them match your image?
If so, this image has been taken from somewhere on the web. You can see in this example that this exact image appears as a Pinterest pin:
If I scroll down further, it also appears in a video!
It is illegal to take images off of google and use them for your own website. This violates copyright law.
Don’t do it!
A better idea is to get your images from a reputable free image source like Pexels
Hope this article was helpful?
