My personal favorite resources for graphics are www.istockphoto.com and www.dreamstime.com – Both these sites feature millions of photos that you can download for a small fee and then use in your presentations without further royalty payments. The big challenge is finding the right search terms to get to the photo you want.
The two sites are almost identical in operation. You purchase a pack of credits (around $1 per credit, with discounts for larger packs). Then each photo download costs you from 1-10 credits. Smaller photos or lower resolutions cost fewer credits than large, high resolution photos. Here’s a tip… For on-screen viewing, a low resolution 96 dpi picture is all you need. And an image size of 800×600 is plenty. Be careful of saving money by buying a tiny picture and then trying to expand it to fill the slide. Blowing things up reduces image quality. You can always scale down a larger picture more safely.
Another site worth looking at is www.flickr.com/creativecommons. This site includes “attribution-only” photos that you can use without even paying for a download. The catch is that you have to put attribution for the picture in your presentation. If you use a lot of pictures from a single source, you could put the attribution up front on your title slide. But if you pull pictures from different contributors, you would need to put attributions on each picture, which I find distracting.
Finding appropriate pictures takes time. One trick I use is to see what other people have done for similar phrases. I’ll type the title of my slide or some other catch phrase into Google Image Search and see what comes up. It gives me inspiration and ideas I might not have thought about. But please be careful about grabbing images directly off other people’s websites. Most web content is copyrighted material. But there’s nothing preventing you from writing the company and asking if you can use one of their pictures in your presentation!
From Ken Molay