6 Blog Image Resources We Couldn’t Live Without
Images are an essential part of blogging — here are 6 blog image resources we just couldn’t live without!
1. Librestock
Librestock is THE ultimate source for stock images.
Librestock collects results from all the major free stock image providers, meaning that you don’t need to go searching through a whole load of different sites to find the image you want.
The search feature is pretty intelligent, and you’re likely to find an image to suit most needs.
As the content is collected from across a number of different sources, it’s a good idea to double check the usage rights on each individual image to make sure your use is covered.
2. Coolors.co
If you want to create a colour scheme to use on a project, then this site is for you.
Open up the Generator, add your main brand colour to one of the columns (using its Hex code), and hit the padlock icon.
Then hit the spacebar until you find a scheme you like.
You can also hit the padlock icon on any column at any time, to lock those colours in place — and there’s your brand colour scheme.
Create an account, and you can save your colours for later use.
3. Canva
It’s no secret that we LOVE Canva.
It’s managed to strike a balance between powerful editing and ease of use.
For throwing together blog images, email graphics, and ad creatives, it’s brilliant.
Just load in your images from Librestock, use some colours from Coolors.co, and you’re good to go.
The export options include hi-res, print-ready PDFs too, so your print jobs are covered too.
(N.B. At this stage, the PDF export doesn’t support embedded fonts, so make sure whoever is doing the print job has the appropriate fonts installed.)
4. Gimp
Photoshop is ace, and with the Creative Cloud, it’s now more affordable than ever.
But if you don’t want to shell out your cash, there’s a brilliant open source alternative.
GIMP is bloody powerful, and can do 98%* of the things you’d want to do in Photoshop.
Give it a download, and spend some time getting used to it — it’s a worthwhile investment, especially if you’re bootstrapping.
(*I just made this figure up. It does LOADS. That’s my point.)
5. Bulk Resize Photos
Got loads of photos to upload to Facebook, but they’re all MASSIVE (in dimensions as well as filesize)?
We get this a lot — often, photographers will send across a suite of ultra-hi-res images for clients. Often, they’re upwards of 15MB each. And we’re asked to get them up on social media.
You don’t need to post a 15MB image on social media.
You don’t even need to post a 0.5MB image on social media.
So, use this free Bulk Resize Photos tool to reduce your files to a much more manageable size — for easy uploading and sharing.
The best feature is that it doesn’t run in the cloud, so you don’t have to upload massive files in order to resize. Brilliant.
6. TinyPNG and TinyJPG
On a similar note, there are many occasions where you’ll want to get the smallest filesize possible for your images.
Adding images to your site, or your blog post for example.
After scripting, image filesize is one of the biggest causes of slow page loading times — and if your site is slow, you lose visitors while it loads.
As a rule of thumb, we aim to get our site images as close to 40KB as we can.
It’s not always possible — but it’s our target.
TinyPNG and TinyJPG are the simplest way to get a decent reduction on your image filesizes.
Plus, they’re free. Awesome.
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Originally published at Impact Business Advisors.
