How to find free photos online for your About Page’s Graphic Profile

This is Step One of how to create a Graphic Profile for your About Page.

It’s time for me to work on my About Page. I’ve decided to tackle creating my Graphic Profile, and write a tutorial on how to do it at the same time.

The first step is to collect all the photos you need for your montage. The photos have to be of things that you’re passionate about. ChiQ has 14 items in her Graphic Profile. If I want to create a Jigsaw Puzzle effect, I need to have 6 or 20 photos to have one for each piece. I think a 6 piece puzzle isn’t enough for a Graphic Profile, so I’d have to go with 20.

So, my plan is to aim for 20 photos of things I feel passionate about. And to get them from free sites, where possible.

I’m going to show you where I’m going to get my photos from. There are two free photo sites that I often use:

http://morguefile.com/

http://www.sxc.hu/

The usage rights are good for my purposes - check them for yourself.

The first thing I’ll try to do is find an Aussie flag. I want to include the Australian flag as one image, because I’m an Aussie. I’m not sure I’ll find one on either of these sites, but it’s worth a quick search.

I’ve found a few on Stock.Xchng. I’m going to click on and save the first photo, because the usage rights for

it are easier than for the others that I like. (The Beach House requires you to notify the photographer if you use it for a public work, and the Australian Flag requires you to get permission before using the photo. The Aussie flag doesn’t require anything special.)

Now, I’m going to search for and save other photos relating to my interests. Here is what I’ve collected:

I have more than one photo for some of my interests. For some, I’m not sure which will look better as a part of the montage, so I saved a couple of photos for it. And for some others, I saved two because I want to combine the two images into one, like the scissors and the colorful paper next to it.

I’ve considered adding photos of my kids, but if I’ve decided that pictures of toys would be better. I’m not sure I want photos of my children on a business site. There are issues of security and relevance.

It takes a while to find so many photos, so give yourself a good chunk of time to do this in.

The next step will be creating montages with the images. I plan on doing a jigsaw style and a grid-based style like ChiQ’s, and then I’ll use the one I like better.

If you have any questions or ideas, please leave a comment.

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