Be careful about photos. Don’t just take photos off other sites and use them.
Do not use photos from “free” photo sites. Sometimes they are actually copyrighted and you can get hit with a lawsuit. This really happens. I cannot stress enough to be careful about photos.
Take photos yourself. You don’t have to have an expensive camera or anything. The photos you take on your phone should be fine.
Adobe Express
You can edit your photos and create really professional looking graphics with Adobe Express.
There are tutorials to help you get started and improve your skills.
Wikimedia Commons
You can find photos at Wikimedia Commons. Wikimedia Commons is free. There are different rules for different images. Many of them want you to give credit to the author. That means, under the photo put “Photo by XXX.” If you use the photo as a featured image, you can put at the end of your article “Featured image photo by XXX.”
Unlike traditional media repositories, Wikimedia Commons is free. Everyone is allowed to copy, use and modify any files here freely as long as they follow the terms specified by the author; this often means crediting the source and author(s) appropriately and releasing copies/improvements under the same freedom to others. The license conditions of each individual media file can be found on their description page. The Wikimedia Commons database itself and the texts in it are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
Fair Use
If you are talking about or promoting a product, using a photo of the product from the manufacturers site can be considered fair use.
Using a photo of one companies product to promote a competitors product is asking for trouble.
Photo Editing WordPress Plugins
I use Adobe Fireworks to edit images, but to get started, you can use a free WordPress Plugin.
WP Paint is the one I see recommended most often, but there are others. Try the free version and see if it is intuitive for you.
WP Paint – WordPress Image Editor >
Purchase Photos
Often it makes sense to purchase photos.
There are different rights to photos, so make sure you have purchased the rights to use the photo the way you want to use it.
Try to Be Unique
You are not the only person buying this photo. Before you pick a photo, you really should compare other sites that will be compared with yours. Google to see what other businesses like yours, especially in your area, are using as photos. Don’t accidentally buy the exact same ones, or really even ones that look too much like theirs. Especially be careful about the faces in the photos.
Aspect Ratio
If you need a horizontal photo, make sure you buy a horizontal photo. It is often really hard to make vertical photos fit without chopping off some of the elements you bought the photo for.
The aspect ratio is the images shape. A square is 1:1. It is the same height and width. You can usually sort photos by aspect ratio when you are searching.
Before you buy a photo, you need to be sure it is the right shape.
Size
The bigger the photo is, the more it often costs. You can save money by purchasing the smaller sizes, as long as it is big enough for where you want to use it. If you are also going to use the photo for print, it needs to be bigger. The web uses photos that are only 72dpi, dots per inch. But if you print at only 72 dpi, it looks bad.
Sometimes you only want to use part of a photo. Be sure that you buy a big enough photo to cut it down without making it so small it will be blurry.
Before you buy any photos, have your site planned out. That way you know what photos you need. Often people just buy a bunch of photos that they like, then use them on pages where they don’t really make any sense, just because they want to use them.