Photography For Your Shoe String Budget eLearning

One of the biggest challenges in developing e-Learning is to create visually appealing work with little or no money. There are millions of sources online that you can draw from for your visual images. However, the legal use of these images is something you need to consider before you publish it to your audience. Using a photographer's work without their permission and without paying the appropriate license fee is copyright infringement.

Some of my colleagues have tried to claim that using a photo from the Internet in an e-learning course can fall under fair use laws. Claiming fair use is only sometimes valid. If you were teaching your audience about a company, you can use their company logo and call it fair use. You could not use a photograph of their CEO taken by a photojournalist, nor could you use a funny comic strip about that company without paying the appropriate license fees to the original creators of those materials. There are balance tests that a court would use to determine if fair use applies to each case. However, you don't want it to get that far.

Here are some great resources for multimedia that may be helpful for those with little or no budget to spend:

Pikwizard is an excellent free stock photo site with over 100,000 high-quality images. One thing that makes Pikwizard unique in the category of free image websites is the number of high-quality photos of people. Often you can only find pictures of people on the pay-per-use or subscription stock photo sites. Be aware that each image has it's own license restrictions, and you must follow those restrictions. For example, you could not use an image marked for editorial use in your eLearning. One feature handy for eLearning developers with little or no budget is that Pikward gives you the ability to edit the photos right inside your browser with their Designwizard software. 

Wikimedia is a collection of multimedia that, for the most part, is open and free to use without an individual permission. The particular creators retain the ownership of all these resources. Check for the licensing terms for each item to ensure that your planned use is acceptable.

MorgueFile is a site dedicated to free photography. In most cases, you can reuse their material within your work. However, you cannot use it on its own. You may be able to modify much of the work, so cropping out parts of the photo that you do not need can be considered acceptable.

Turbophoto maintains a small repository of free stock images that you can download and reuse. The selection isn't vast. However, you can add this as a source in case you are designing material that happens to fit one of the ten or so topics they cover.

4FreePhotos is an excellent site that is maintained by photographers who love taking pictures and getting them out there. The website seems to be funded by lots of ads, but I don't mind this as the photos are all free.

Stock.XCHNG is another excellent resource with a vast number of photos. They do require an account set up with a login and password, and you will need to read their license agreement for the images you download as there are some restrictions.

Of course, last but not least, almost everyone owns a digital camera. If everyone in your training department took a dozen or so pictures each week to contribute to a team multimedia database, you would find that you would have a massive stockpile of free to use images or videos in reasonably short order. Take pictures of your companies building, your competition, the products that you sell, and more. Since you own the images, you will never have to pay royalties or license fees to anyone or worry about infringing on anyone's intellectual property.

Need Some Images For Your eLearning?

There have been other free photography sites, but I can assure that I've not seen anything like this before. Sometimes a site will offer free downloads but when it came time to using those images you still needed to purchase a license. Alternatively, there are other sites that offer free downloads, but you need to attribute the original photographer a specific way. Of course, I'm okay with everyone getting the attribution they deserve, but my clients don't want some fine print at the bottom of each slide of their eLearning course.

Check out https://pikwizard.com/ when you get a chance. They're just starting out, but they already have over 100,000 completely free images, of which 20,000 are exclusive to them. They are updating their library of stock photos daily and have expressed to me that their goal is to have more than 1 million images.

One thing that is rare are free sites that include pictures of people. You see models are required to sign a release and it's difficult for photographers and photo sites to get photos of people for free distribution. Pikwizard.com has a lot of pictures of people. Check this out for yourself by searching their site for things like "office" or "meeting", and you'll find some great quality examples of these types of photos.

I asked Micheal Brennan from Pikwizard.com how can all these files be truly free? 

Micheal explained that the photos on the site have two different licenses. 

The first is Creative Commons Universal. Pik Wizard doesn't own the images but the people who do have waived the copyright and allowed the use of the photos. You can learn more about this type of license here: https://pikwizard.com/cc0-license. 

The other license is where Pik Wizard owns the images but made them free to use without attribution. They still retain the copyright. You can learn about this type of license here: https://pikwizard.com/free-license.

Michael went on to explain that there are certain cases where an image can't be used, but in 99% of the cases, you will be free to use these photos for free without attribution. Each image will have an explanation on its page that covers these sorts of details.

Hope you find this useful.