Images for a company website — where to get them legally and when you need your own

The question asked most often is where to get images for a website without paying. The question that should follow immediately is what you are then not allowed to do with them — because the answer surprises companies convinced that free means anything goes.

This text answers both, and then a third: when no borrowed image will do.

"Copyright-free" does not exist

Start with a correction, because everything else follows from it.

An image from a free library is under copyright. What is free is the licence — the author's permission for a defined use, granted in advance and without payment. Those are two different things, and the difference surfaces the moment you do something the licence does not cover.

We read the texts of the two most widely used licences.

The Unsplash licence is short: it grants an irrevocable, nonexclusive, worldwide permission to download, copy, modify and use images for free, including commercially, without asking and without crediting the photographer. There are two prohibitions: selling images without significant modification, and compiling them into a service competing with Unsplash.

The Pexels licence also requires no attribution, but lists five prohibited things, and the real traps for a company sit in them:

• identifiable people may not appear in a bad light or in an offensive way,
• you may not sell unaltered copies — as a poster, a print or on a physical product,
• you may not imply that a person or brand in the image endorses your product,
• you may not redistribute or sell the images on other stock platforms,
• you may not use an image as a trademark, design mark, trade name or service mark.

The third and fifth get broken unknowingly and regularly. A photograph of a smiling person captioned with a satisfied customer's quotation implies an endorsement that person never gave. A graphic from a free library used as a logo or part of one is a breach that only surfaces when you try to register the mark — and it is expensive by then.

The practical conclusion: read the licence once, for the library you use, and write those two or three sentences down. Libraries differ from each other more than the shared word "free" suggests, and the licence attached to an individual image is sometimes different from the service's default.

What you actually get from a stock library

Libraries divide not into "free and paid" but into those that take on the risk and those that do not. That is the whole difference and it is worth knowing before choosing.

Free libraries (Unsplash, Pexels, Pixabay and similar) offer images uploaded by their authors on common terms. The service does not verify individually whether the photographer had rights to everything in the frame — whether the person in the picture consented to commercial use of their likeness, whether the building, artwork or logo visible in the background may be shown. In practice the risk is small and most companies will never feel it, but formally it sits with you.

Paid libraries (Shutterstock, Getty and similar) sell, within the price of the licence, mainly this: verified provenance, model releases and, in the more expensive tiers, an undertaking by the service to cover the consequences if something turns out to be wrong. You are paying for peace of mind and paperwork, not for better photographs — the free ones are sometimes better.

When does that matter? When an image goes onto printed material in a large run, a billboard or a paid campaign — that is, where withdrawing is expensive. On a website, where a file is swapped in a minute, the risk is negligible.

Two distinctions in the pricing that are easy to get wrong:

• Standard versus extended licence. A standard one usually does not cover selling an item the image is printed on, nor print runs above a certain threshold. If you are planning T-shirts, packaging or a large print run, that is not the licence.
• Model release. Without one, an image with an identifiable person may usually be used only editorially — illustrating informational content — and not in advertising. Paid libraries mark this on the image; free ones usually do not.

A rule of thumb that covers most companies: free libraries for the website, paid ones for print and advertising.

Where stock is fine and where it costs you credibility

This is the decision where companies lose most, and it has a simple rule.

A library image is an illustration. Your own photograph is evidence. Everywhere you expect trust from the reader, evidence is what is needed, and no amount of illustration quality substitutes for it.

Places where stock is fine and bothers nobody: illustrating an article, a section background, an abstract graphic next to a concept, icons, explanatory material in a deck.

Places where stock works against you: the "About us" page, a product listing, a photograph of your premises, the results of your work. The mechanism is merciless — a client who recognises the same image on a competitor's site or in a bank advertisement stops believing not only the image but the rest of the page. An image standing where evidence belongs, and not being evidence, does more harm than no image at all.

A way to reduce the risk if you do reach for stock: do not take the first results. Sort by date added, or make the query more specific. The popular images on the first page of results are popular with everyone at once.

When your own shoot pays off

Not always. It depends on one thing: whether the image is one of the factors deciding a purchase.

In hospitality, hotels, beauty services, aesthetic medicine and premium products — it is. There the image is part of the product, and economising on it is economising on the offer. In a service, consulting or technology business it rarely decides, and a set of team photographs plus well-chosen illustrations is enough.

Two distinctions that save the most money:

Product versus lifestyle photography. The first shows the thing — detail, finish, size, usually on a neutral background. The second shows the situation it is used in. A manufacturer of office furniture needs both, for different purposes. A children's clothing shop without lifestyle is a catalogue, not a shop. In business-to-business selling it is the reverse: product photography dominates, because the buyer wants the specification, not the mood.

A shoot versus a phone. A current phone in good light on a neutral background takes product photographs that are perfectly adequate to start — provided they are consistent: the same distance, the same background, the same light in every frame. An inconsistent gallery shot on an expensive camera looks worse than a consistent one shot on a phone. A professional shoot starts paying where a phone cannot go: difficult light, large objects, work in motion, catalogue-grade retouching.

Likenesses in your own photographs

This works both ways, and companies forget the second. If you photograph your own team, you need those people's consent to publish — including when the photograph was taken at a company event, and especially when somebody leaves and the photograph stays on the site. Verbal consent is sufficient until it is not.

Two things worth setting up once: a sentence about consent to use a likeness in the contract or a separate declaration, and the habit of removing photographs of people who no longer work with you. The second is more common and more troublesome than the first.

The same applies to photographs at a client's site — a completed job, an interior, an installation. Consent to take a photograph is not consent to publish it in a portfolio, and that is worth settling when signing the contract rather than afterwards.

Images generated by AI

The question comes up on every project now, so the answer plainly, together with what we do not know.

An image from a generator solves the "illustration for an article" problem cheaply, and without the risk that somebody recognises it from another site. That is its only, but real, advantage over stock.

What it does not solve: anything in the right-hand column above. A generated team is not your team, a generated product is not your product, a generated interior is not your premises. Placed where evidence belongs, a generated image is exactly the same error as stock, only harder for a client to detect and therefore more dishonest.

The legal status of such images is unsettled in the European Union and we will not pretend to know the answer. The practical caution we apply ourselves: we do not use generated images where they are meant to prove something, and we do not put them into material that is later meant to become a trademark.

File weight: what WebP actually saves

The other half of the subject is technical, and here the numbers are checkable.

In the WebP documentation Google states two figures:

> WebP lossy images are 25-34% smaller than comparable JPEG images at equivalent SSIM quality index.

>

> WebP lossless images are 26% smaller in size compared to PNGs.

The caveat at the end of the first sentence matters more than the figure itself. "At equivalent SSIM quality index" means the comparison holds at the same measured quality, not at the same slider position in an image editor. Exporting WebP at "80" and comparing it with JPEG at "80" is not that measurement and can give any result at all.

We add a second caveat ourselves: whether it changes anything on your page is measurable only on your page. Measure LCP before converting the images and after. The Core Web Vitals threshold for a "good" rating is 2.5 seconds; above 4 seconds the rating is "poor". Copying somebody else's improvement percentage is useless here, because it depends on how many images you have and how heavy they are now.

Dimensions, crops and proportions

Fixing a few standard sizes at the start of a project saves adjusting every image individually later.

Choose proportions for the slot, not for the photograph. A wide 16:9 frame suits header sections and video. A 1:1 square is safe for products and grid tiles, because it looks the same in any layout. 4:3 works in galleries and presentations.

Keep important elements in the middle of the frame. The same graphic is cropped from different sides on a large monitor and on a phone; whatever sits near the edge disappears first. This applies especially to header images carrying text — the most common error is a caption that ends halfway on a phone.

Crop product photographs identically. The same distance, the same background, the same margin. A gallery where every item is shown differently looks accidental, even if each photograph is good on its own.

The rest of the technical rulings, briefly

• Format. JPEG for photographs, PNG where transparency or sharp text edges are needed, WebP as the lighter replacement for both. Every current browser supports it.
• The size you upload. The commonest error is uploading a file straight from the camera, several times larger than the slot it will be displayed in. Cropping to the target dimensions usually gains more than any compression.
• Responsive images. One image at several resolutions, the browser picking the right one. A phone then does not download a file prepared for a large monitor.
• Lazy loading (loading="lazy") for everything below the first screen. Never for images on the first screen, because that delays exactly the thing LCP measures.
• Alt text. A description of what the image shows, for somebody who will not see it. Not a place for keywords. Leave a purely decorative image with an empty attribute rather than describing the background.

Images and the search engine

Images can be a separate source of visits and simultaneously the commonest reason a page loads slowly. Those two pull in opposite directions and have to be reconciled.

The file name is a free description almost nobody uses. IMG_4471.jpg tells neither the search engine nor you anything when you go looking for that photograph in a folder a year later. A descriptive name, lower case, hyphens instead of spaces, costs five seconds at upload.

Alt text has two audiences: somebody using a screen reader and the search engine, in that order. Describe what the image shows, in a sentence that makes sense read aloud. Stuffing phrases is recognisable and does not work; a purely decorative image is better left with an empty attribute than described.

Visits from image search are real mainly where people are looking for what something looks like — products, completed work, before and after, interiors. In consulting services they barely occur and planning for them is wasted effort.

Keep the order of importance in mind. An image that slows the first screen does more harm than any gain from image search. If you must choose between a lighter file and a higher resolution for the search engine, choose the lighter one — how a page behaves while loading we cover separately under website positioning.

Graphics and infographics: when they are worth making

An infographic makes sense when it has something to show — that is, when the content contains numbers or a relationship hard to state in a sentence. A bulleted list turned into a colourful picture is not an infographic, it is a bulleted list that now weighs two hundred kilobytes and cannot be copied or read on a phone.

A good rule: if the same thing would work equally well as a list, leave the list. If it shows a process, a comparison or a change over time, the drawing wins.

There is another reason to draw, and it is often more important than aesthetics. A drawing forces a decision. The sentence "costs rise with scale" can be written without knowing by how much or from what point. The chart of that same sentence cannot be drawn without both numbers — and in half the cases it then turns out there are no numbers and the sentence was a guess. That test catches more misunderstandings in a text than any proofreading.

Treat icons as interface elements, not ornaments. An icon the reader has to puzzle over costs more attention than it saves. If it needs a caption, the caption is the content and the icon is the extra.

Three things that separate a useful drawing from a decorative one:

• The caption says what is shown, not what the section is called. A drawing without a caption is decoration, even if it contains data.
• The source sits next to the drawing, not in a bibliography at the end. A number on a chart without a stated origin is an unsupported claim, however well it is drawn.
• The drawing is readable on a phone. A diagram with ten labels in two columns on a five-centimetre screen is not a diagram, it is a picture.

Format: draw schematics and charts as SVG, not as a screenshot. They scale without losing sharpness, weigh a fraction of a PNG and stay legible when enlarged — and a reader on a phone enlarges.

An hour-long image review worth doing once

It needs no tools and no designer. Open your own site on a phone and go through five questions.

1. Is any image standing where evidence belongs without being evidence? An "About us" page with a stock team, a service page with a generated interior. That is the first thing to replace and the only one that genuinely does harm.
2. Are the logo and text graphics sharp? A blurred logo on a phone is a signal the client receives without being able to name it.
3. Does the first screen load immediately? If the header image appears late, check whether lazy loading has been set on it — the commonest cause and the easiest to fix.
4. Are product photographs cropped identically? Five minutes of comparison in the gallery.
5. Has anyone in the team photographs stopped working with you?

Of those five, the first and the fifth are the only ones with consequences beyond aesthetics. The rest is tidying that can be spread over time.

What this text deliberately leaves out

• Colours, typefaces, brand guidelines and visual consistency — a separate subject, covered in the section on starting a business; that text exists so far only in Polish on this domain, so we name it rather than send you to an empty page. This text is about images on a website, not about a company's visual system.
• Product photography in an online shop — there an image is part of the product listing and follows separate rules; we cover it in the ecommerce section.
• Comparisons of specific graphics tools — they change faster than a text can be kept current, and the queries about them are navigational: people type the name of a program to open it, not to read about it.
• How to write the texts these images are meant to illustrate — SEO copywriting and content marketing.