Using photos from the web for videos?

Hi Drakuul.

You should simply AVOID doing a Google search for images, because you will be wasting a lot of time trying to figure out if you can use an image found that way, and likely you cannot anyway - unless you are some sort of reporter/news service.

The best thing to do is use Flickr for your photo searches, and find a photographer that has a liberal creative commons license. Usually this simply means you agree to give him credit for his photographs, and you can easily do this by adding his URL at the end of your video.

Just a glance on the Flickr page you can see there are more than 40 MILLION photos with liberal use rights.

See the Creative Commons description here:
http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/

Photographers often use Flickr as a way to gain exposure for their work, and most will be more than happy somebody noticed their work and want to use their images. This works well for ALL niches too, as you will often find that a photographer has many "related" photos. So in your example, if there is a hair style shot in his portfolio, there are often many others.

Recently one of my friends did an entire travel eBook using this method by contacting a handful of photographers on Flickr. Most of them were down-right giddy we wanted to use their pictures.

1- Sign up for a Flickr account so you can contact other users.

2- Do a search for your niche topics and find some photographers/hobbyists who have lots of uploads. You are only interested in the users who have the Attribution license or Attribution-ShareAlike license under Creative Commons.

3- Get a list of their photos you want to use, and simply send them an email requesting permission to use the photos, describing how you will "credit" their work, normally a URL address at the end of your video or a link within your eBook perhaps.

Note: Do not let them negotiate significant changes to your production - there are just too many other suppliers you can approach, but be sure to give them their fair credit and exposure - because in a way we are all artists when you create a new product.