Dirty little Trick to get iStock Images for FREE! Enjoy!

[ronywilliam]

Ok I've knows this and used this trick for almost 1-2 years. The reason i use this is because its hard to find the "right" image which can be found easily on istock. I think most of your wont know this so i thought i'd share. If you know this you can just ignore this share.

1) Go to istock photo and select the picture you like.
2) Copy image url of that picture and paste that in

http://www.tineye.com/

3) Tin Eye would find the same images used on other websites in full size without watermark.
4) Save Image and use it for whatever you like.

Best part is since these are istock images nobody would think that actually "dint" buy the image. The "popular" images which have had thousands of sales are very easy to find with this method!

Hope that helps!

 

[healzer]

It doesn't work with all images, I just tried the method with a random picture and no luck

 

[ronywilliam]

It doesn't work with all images, I just tried the method with a random picture and no luck

Sort by downloads on a search term. The popular ones can be found pretty easily.

 

[IKbentim]

Watch out with stealing stock images.. there's a lot of horror stories online about people getting sued.

 

[JenniFranks]

I sell on iStockPhoto, and they are absolutely brutal when it comes to compliance enforcement.

Besides, microstock is inexpensive. You can't afford the $2 to legitimately license a photo? I don't know about you, but it's definitely not worth my time to be trying to reverse image search the photo I want in the hope that some used it without modifying it.

 

[-SICK-]

Watch out with stealing stock images.. there's a lot of horror stories online about people getting sued.

crop and rename them, and you should be fine. You can change the colour tone a little bit. If you modify some pixels, nobody can sue you.

kind regards,
SICK

 

[JenniFranks]

crop and rename them, and you should be fine. You can change the colour tone a little bit. If you modify some pixels, nobody can sue you.

Totally untrue. It makes it harder to notice, but it is most definitely still copyright infringement.

 

[walandio]

great share.. thanks for this..

 

[-SICK-]

Totally untrue. It makes it harder to notice, but it is most definitely still copyright infringement.

I dont think so, because its a different picture. You could have created this picture by placing each pixel yourself, so its no provable copyright infringement.

It depends on the country you or the artist live in, though.

kind regards,
SICK

 

[ronywilliam]

I sell on iStockPhoto, and they are absolutely brutal when it comes to compliance enforcement.

Besides, microstock is inexpensive. You can't afford the $2 to legitimately license a photo? I don't know about you, but it's definitely not worth my time to be trying to reverse image search the photo I want in the hope that some used it without modifying it.

Well i use legit stock on our main projects but we do a lot of throw away doorway pages for testing on a daily basis.. say for PPV or something we do stuff like this.

When making campaigns for PPV you throw 10-20 different landing pages and each page requires 2-3 stock pictures. It becomes very expensive to build pages if we start paying for all the images. If something starts converting we buy the stock.. but for experiments this saves quite some $$

 

[imserious]

Please read the horror stories when people have used these without buying.. This does not make photos unique..

 

[Kyle787]

I use this from time to time. And on images it doesn't work on.. if it isn't a complicated image you can Photoshop the watermark out easily if you look up some tutorials on how to use the stamp tool.

 

[redlaunch]

tired on 3 pics and it couldnt find any of them.

 

[IKbentim]

Well i use legit stock on our main projects but we do a lot of throw away doorway pages for testing on a daily basis.. say for PPV or something we do stuff like this.

When making campaigns for PPV you throw 10-20 different landing pages and each page requires 2-3 stock pictures. It becomes very expensive to build pages if we start paying for all the images. If something starts converting we buy the stock.. but for experiments this saves quite some $$

And? So people like you and me have to suffer because you can't be bothered with paying for shit? Maybe i should start copying all your stuff then.

I go on Photodune to buy my stock photo's and i pay about $1 per photo and using about 3 photo's on my site.

So if you can't afford $1 for a picture you should

1) Get free stockphoto's
2) Make your own stockphoto's
3) Get a job.

 

[InvincibleCucumber]

For truly royalty-free images, free for commercial use, just register at morguefile dot com. Plenty of images, never a problem with a license.

 

[SneakySnake]

This is a neat trick Rony, although I tend to agree that there are risks attached. I'd be cautious about using unlicensed images on a 'money site'. Hate the thought of it coming back to bite you a year or two down the road. Even for test purposes, there are plenty of free stock images out there which don't involve the same issues.

But regardless of any such concerns, it is a really smart technique, and one I have never come across - so thanks a lot for bringing it to our attention.

I can think of a few other things TinEye could be useful for...

 

[SneakySnake]

For truly royalty-free images, free for commercial use, just register at morguefile dot com. Plenty of images, never a problem with a license.

I'm scared to look... Reassure me that they're not ACTUAL morgue photos.
I'm sure there's a lot of money in the necrophilia niche, and no risk of the subjects sueing, but... nah.

 

[srb888]

Thanks guys, both sides!
I prefer not to use OP's method because I have seen a few horror stories esp where images are concerned. I and my son are good graphics experts and I have a great experience of working in a very huge international exhibitions company as a graphics manager, handling 4 graphics stations at a time and 2 top-quality very professional vinyl cutting robots simultaneously and sometimes 2-3 full days straight work without sleep.

The reason I say this is because we wanted to begin our own web designing company -- a tiny one -- but we held back because we didn't knew how we should get those beautiful graphics LEGALLY and for low cost instead of paying the huge extended price we need to pay for such web graphics and for such commercial use. We intended to sell websites, templates, graphics, etc. While I have that huge graphics experience, my son is a very good web designer (actually he is chiefly a software designer/developer and he also does much website designing/development as part of his work for overseas companies. He's employed with a good sw development company which obviously does not reveal to him how it or its clients procure all the images they want).

Point made short, we are not willing to do that sort of high-end web designing work ourselves unless the graphics we get should be obtained legally as well as those are affordable to both us and our clients.

I have downloaded such images many times, but I have never used and will never use those images for my clients. I also wouldn't use /haven't used those on my own personal sites.

These are my personal views on the topic.

P.S.:
I have used the images from such sites like iStock... and downloaded only the watermarked images and used them on a few designs so that our clients can visualize the final effect but that's only a small part. The client buys those images directly if (s)he likes the effect. When we want to sell our designs for the open market, then we cannot use the above trial method obviously.

 

[tactics084]

Just to let you guys know I work at a photography studio and when I was g00gling a few months ago I found one of our copyrighted image that a company was using on their website. Guess what? We got to bill them $300 and they HAD to pay. So just make sure you use your own image or buy some cheap ones to be safe. I gotta tell ya that it feels good to bill them but it'll suck to pay.

 

[teeniegenie]

Why not sign up for an unlimited subscription with a service like clipart.com? An annual account is $159 and you can download as many pics as you want. They offer clipart and fonts on top of traditional photos like istock has. A while back I subscribed for a month and spent a lot of time downloading a bunch of photos for different categories I needed for my websites. Works great. I'm sure there is even an automated way to download in mass, but I'm not that smart...If anyone has an automated downloading method for a site like clipart, I'd love to know about it.

http://www.clipart.com/en/

Well i use legit stock on our main projects but we do a lot of throw away doorway pages for testing on a daily basis.. say for PPV or something we do stuff like this.

When making campaigns for PPV you throw 10-20 different landing pages and each page requires 2-3 stock pictures. It becomes very expensive to build pages if we start paying for all the images. If something starts converting we buy the stock.. but for experiments this saves quite some $$