Image Best Practices
Copyright
The first and possibly most important item to keep in mind is copyright. Copyright is a federal law of the United States of America. Copyright pertains to any original work as soon as it is created. If you don’t own it, you need to make sure you have the right to use and or do anything to it. However, there are places to obtain images without having to take them yourself.
Making sure you can legally use images
Images used by the University of Arkansas are considered commercial use.
When in doubt, assume it is subject to copyright and don’t use it without permission, unless it is speciffically indicated free for commercial use.
- When using images from a photographer or friend you know, ask for permission. You must have written consent.
- Think about where you found the image. Did you Google it? Google images are not free for public use, they are just a collection of images pulled from websites around the world and likely owned by someone
Images Free for Commercial Use
- Resource Space is a large collection of stock images from the University's photographers that are available at your request
- Pixabay has images & royalty free stock illustrations, vectors, videos and music
- StockSnap has free stock photos
Image Size
Before uploading an image to your site, check the image size and dimensions. The size of an image can greatly affect your visitor user experience. An image that is too small can show up blurry and pixelated and an image that is too large can slow down page speed and be a detriment to your search engine optimization. Learn more about image sizes and how to optimize images for the web
Free Image Editing/Resizing Tools
- Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Photoshop Elements (available to Faculty, Staff and Students.If you do not have access to a computer, there are labs on campus that offer free Photoshop use.
- Compressor.io – Online tool for drastically reducing the size of your images and photos whiles maintaining a high quality with almost no difference before and after compression. The file formats supported are JPEG, PNG, GIV, SVG.
- Irfanview – Free image editing option.
- OU Campus also has an image editing feature that allows you to crop and resize images.
Accessibility
Always include an alt attribute with your images. This includes a description of what is in the image in case the image doesn’t load or in case it is being processed through a screen reader. This is also important when images are used to describe something like a type of plant or if the image has important text on it that needs to be presented to the viewer
A decorative image still needs an alt tag, but the content of that tag can be left blank.
Alt Attributes
Alt attributes, or alt text, gives a description to non-decorative images and is an important part of image accessibility. Learn how to write proper alt text from the W3.org.
A decorative image still needs an alt tag, but the content of that tag can be left blank.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search engines also help with Google image results. It is important to use keywords strategically when posting images.
Keyword placement is extremely important when Google crawls a page. So, ensure that your keywords are used in the right way to increase your rank in Google’s search engine results page.
Google Trends is a free way to research what keywords to use strategically.