Free Stock Images: Discover an Untapped Resource in Google Drive

Did you know that Google Drive has free stock images tucked away inside it?

Well we certainly didn’t and we use Google Drive (previously Google Docs) a lot.

For those of you who have never used Google Docs it is a free, web-based word processor, spreadsheet, presentation offered by Google.

It allows users to create and edit documents on-line while collaborating in real-time with other users, which of course is great for us as we live 80 miles apart.

My usual MO (Method of Operation) of finding how things work is to just press buttons and see what happens. Sometimes this can end up being more trouble than it’s worth, but sometimes it produces gold.

Enter Free Stock Images in Google Drive

Google Drive now offers a collection of 5000 high quality free stock images for use with your Google docs, presentation slides and spreadsheets.

In August last year Google made a post on their Google Drive page on Google Plus, asking the Google+ community to choose 10 images (from Thinkstock.com, a popular stock images website) which they would like to use in their documents and slides.

The Google team then pulled together 13 categories of photos which are available in Google Drive and for use in Google documents.

If you don’t use Google Drive, then you just may not be aware of this resource, so the easiest thing to do is to show you where they are.

Step 1

Go to Google Drive and open a document – either a document, presentation or spreadsheet. Here’s where you would do this:

Step 2

Let’s say that you opened a Presentation (for those of you who don’t use Google Drive, this is similar to Power Point, and really easy to use)

Select a theme to start with – I choose ‘Simple Light’ and I removed the ‘Click Here’ text boxes to make is easier to show you the process.

Step 3

So then you want to include an image in the presentation.

Click ‘Insert Image’ as in this screenshot

(Ooh, I’m trying out a new tool to take a Screenshot, and those red lines are a bit wobbly – ha ha)

Step 4

Put in the search box, the subject you are looking for and then press ‘search’

Then you can also click on the drop down menu (next to the Google icon – see below) and search more specifically for say a face, clip art, line drawing and so on.

Step 5

You can also search for images that are predominantly a particular colour, by selecting the colour choice to search for. See what I mean in this screenshot.

Most useful if you want to tie in the colours on a page.

And that’s all there is to it.

The Issue of crediting a Photo

Now whilst I was researching the post, I did check out a few things with regard to giving credit for the images used. I found a few comments around the service saying how bad Google are in using other people’s images.

However, I believe that these people are not quite correct.

This is what Google say in their notes on this:

When using the Google Image Search feature in Google Docs, your results will be filtered to include images labelled with a license that allows you to copy the image for commercial purposes and modify it in ways specified in the license.

This means you can crop, alter or edit them at will.

I clicked on several photos and what I found was that either the images came from sites where you could freely use the images – sites such as pixaby.com or moreguefile.com or the results returned images that were part of the Creative Commons license, where you would need to credit the photo back to the originator. You can check out our post showing you how to credit an image correctly that has a Creative Commons license from this link.

What do you think?

For us, this is a quick way to search images based on colour, subject matter, style and availability whilst we are creating a presentation. We think it’s a great service.

Is this a resource that you would use?

Do you ever use Google Drive?

If not, is it something you might now use?

Do let us know in the comments below.

Image: Colourful Flowers by Navdeep Raj

About Caroline Jones

I'm Caroline and I look to help small business owners create their own graphics by writing tutorials and tips on graphics editing software. I live in Wales & am Welsh but sadly I only know rude Welsh words.

Tags: Creative Commons License, Google Drive, Google Plus