It’s not a copyright defence to say: ‘Well, everyone else used it’. In fact this can make it worse, because it proves the image is more valuable.

The bottom line is: always check the copyright licence for every image.

I say this because one of our online course students was recently invoiced for using an image on her blog.

I told her she was lucky she wasn’t charged more: another of our online course students was made to pay £2500 a while back for using an image that wasn’t hers.

It’s just not worth the risk. You can now use Google image search to filter out the images that are protected by copyright. Simply select the ‘Tools’ button, followed by the ‘Useage rights’ option.

These are the best free image sites I’ve found:

Pixabay
Pxhere
Pexels

The alternative is to take your own stock photos and build up an image library.

See our online courses