Using Google Image Search to Find High-Res Public Domain Images for Your Book — Pictures and Stories

If you are in the process of gathering images to supplement your life story writings, you will generally be using photos from your own life.

But don’t feel you have to limit the images in your book to what you have on hand. If you want to fill in some holes or jazz up the visuals in your project, there are a lot of places to get great images that are free, high quality, and don’t trample on someone else’s copyright.

Why You Need High-Res Images for Print – and How to Get Them

As a personal history book designer, this is probably the number one problem I face with clients on a daily basis. A client will give me an image she pulled off the internet and want it to appear as a full page in her book. But there aren’t enough pixels, so an image that looks great on the screen would look blurry and pixilated in print. Because you need more than three times the number of pixels for print use than for internet use.

(For more detailed information about resolution for print projects, see these posts:)

The Funnel Method for Scanning Photos – Infographic

What You Need to Know About Jpeg Compression

How to Scan Photos for Print

Google Image Search

I’m going to show you two little simple tools you can use in Google Image search to find the right kind — and the right size — images for your project.

Here’s an example of an image search I did for my buddy Neil. I just put Neil Armstrong in the search string and clicked and this is what came up. Problem is, I don’t know what size any of these images are, or if they are safe for me to use without getting sued.