Royalty Free Images – The 6 Best Sites for Healthcare Practices

It goes without saying, that to market your healthcare practice in the current climate, you need high-quality images.

You need them on your:

• Website
• Social media accounts
• Blog
• Business cards
• Banners
• Posters etc.

You really have 4 options when it comes to obtaining new images

1. You can take real, authentic images yourself as mobile phone cameras produce really good resolution pictures
2. You can pay someone else to take professional pictures for you
3. You can find and pay for generic images on the Internet
4. You can find free to use generic images online

 

Staying Authentic

Now I am absolutely a fan of authentic pictures you've taken yourself. They do a really great job of helping portray the real you so people can connect with you, and they help you get pictures taken quickly, simply, and cheaply.

I use pictures like this all the time.

 

I took this using my phone, a tripod, and a Bluetooth shutter release.

I do however think that there is a place in your marketing for professionally taken pictures, both of you, and more general images.

Professional pictures of you are great for real statement images on your website like this one taken in my home office.

 

But you also need a large number of generic high-quality images. Take for example inside this blog. Images break up the text and help you tell the story, and if you are creating a new blog post every couple of weeks, then that is a lot of pictures for you to be setting up and taking yourself. This is where stock images come in; i.e pictures that professionals have taken that you can use to do the job for you.

 

Copyright Warning

BUT you can’t just browse Google and copy and paste any images you find there, because a huge majority of them are owned by someone. They have copyright over them, so if you start using them on your stuff they can (and many will) find you and charge you, or sue you for infringement.

So PLEASE make sure you are only using images that you have either purchased the copyright for or you are certain are copyright free.

 

Weeding out the good from the not so good

Carry out a search on Google for “Royalty-Free Images” and you turn up 393,000,000 results!! So where on earth do you start?

I recently came across this blog post by Mashable

101 places to find amazing, royalty-free images for your business

“WOW,” I thought, this is going to be fantastic to tell my Practice Momentum members about, but as I started to work my way through the list I very quickly realised that not all royalty-free websites are created equal. Some of the sites were fantastic and contained a lot of health-relevant images, while some of them were so awful I didn’t hang around to find out, and others only allowed very low-quality images to be used for free.

So I have worked my way through all 101 websites listed in the Mashable blog post, so you don’t have to, and boiled the list down to 6 websites where, as far as I can tell:

• All the images are totally royalty-free
• There are no fees to pay
• There is no attribution required
• There are no complex sign up processes

BUT PLEASE do check them out for yourself as I did not read every word of every license agreement on every site. I got a bit license weary towards the end if I’m honest.

 

Royalty-Free Images – The 6 Best Sites for Healthcare Practices

So here are my top 6 royalty-free image websites for healthcare practices. The numbers relate to the number of images available in the 4 key categories I searched for, just to give you a feel for the depth of relevant content on each website.

                      Search Terms and Volume
Website       Healthcare    Health    Medical    Wellness

Freepik             273                 2,142          415            122
BURST              394                    394             81                0
Pexels              189                    764           127              29
Pixabay            991                 9,702        3,070           230
Stockvault       456                 2,166           754            169
Unsplash           39                    940           781              18

So there are, plenty for you to choose from. Hopefully, in there you will find one that you really like using and has the images you need.

My personal favourites are Unsplash and Pixabay.

Please remember to check the licensing agreements for the sites and images you decide to use, just in case I missed seeing a required license.

 

Thank you soooo much for taking the time to stop by my healthcare marketing blog.
I really hope you found value in spending some time here today.

I’d be so grateful if you could spare me just another 5 minutes to share your thoughts and anything that struck a chord with you from this blog. Just type straight in the box at the end of this page. I’d love to hear from you.

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Until next time