For many brands and businesses photo albums and photos on Facebook can get up to 180% more engagement and social networking sites like Tumblr and Pinterest drive incredible amounts of traffic back to blogs and websites via images. To put it bluntly, images are more important than ever when it comes to online marketing. Unfortunately, not everyone has the time (or skills) to regularly produce images. Luckily for them, however, there are some free and easy tools that help with image creation in a pinch. Here’s a list of a few of my favorites.
Have Smartphone, Will Travel
If you have time to take your own pictures (or already have a few you’d like to use) and you want to edit them quickly, use some of these tools:
- Instagram – No surprises here, right?
- Google+ – Did you know you can edit images using Google+? Yep! Google provides some great filters, plus you can add text.
- Twitter – Twitter has photo filters now. Here’s how to get started.
- Facebook – Use Aviary Editor to edit photos for your Facebook profile (please note: This isn’t compatible with Pages just yet).
- Photovisi – An easy way to create photo collages.
- Pixlr – Pixlr has smartphone and web apps.
Free Photo Archives
- Stock Xchng – One of the best free photo sites out there.
- Flickr – Per Flickr, “Many Flickr users have chosen to offer their work under a Creative Commons license”, and you can browse or search through content by clicking Advanced Search > Only search within Creative Commons-licensed content.
- Wikipedia – Wikimedia Commons is a media file repository making available public domain and freely-licensed educational media content.
- Morguefile – They say the provide, “high resolution stock photos for your illustration, comp or design needs.”
No Camera Needed
No time to break out the camera? That’s fine too!
- Quozio – Have an excellent quote burning a hole in your pocket? Quozio will make it a pretty image – fast!
- Recite – Creates fun quotes and text-based images. Their branding appears on the image.
- Roflbot – Creates meme-worthy pictures quickly. You can use your own pic, a pic from the web, or let Roflbot randomly select an image. Their branding appears very small on the bottom right hand corner of saved images.
- Memegenerator – Another meme creator. Use already established memes and images and add your own unique slant
- SomeECards – Might be funny for another few months. Maybe.
- Polyvore – This is a fashion-realted photo site that allows you to create and edit outfits and shopping related imagery.
Which tools do you use to create images? Did I miss any good ones?
Shelli Martineau | Digital Marketing 