If you publish content, print or digital, you often need photos to go with your text. Picking pictures for my personal projects (like this site) doesn't feel much like research, but selecting illustrations for a college textbook can become quite a task. (If you'd rather read about photos for blogs, One Dog Woof has some good advice.)

Where I work, in educational publishing, we need photos for most of our college and university textbooks: large, visually appealing images for chapter openers, and smaller, informative pictures to illustrate content throughout the text. Usually junior staff will receive the text of the book that needs new images and will present a few different options for each spot that editors will choose from. We do that only for the inside of the book, though – it's the graphic designers who pick the cover picture.

For a textbook, the criteria of photo selection are narrowly defined. A chapter opener has to illustrate the general concept of the whole chapter, so it can’t be too specific but not too broad either. For example, what photo would you choose to open a chapter on issues and trends in professional communication? (The photo below is what we picked.)

If a textbook has 16 or 19 chapters, and each needs an opener and a bunch of smaller photos in the text, all meeting the strict criteria, that’s where the research begins.

Where to Get Photos?

Some images in textbooks come from specialized databases, like a portrait of a specific person for a history book or a cell cross-section for a biology text. However, for most textbook illustrations, website backgrounds, or blog post, stock photos will do.

There are some good free photo collections on the web, the most popular being Unsplash — that’s where many pictures on this site come from (links in captions). This article from Bootstrap Bay lists the best destinations for spectacular free images to use in your desing. While Unsplash-type images are perfect for most websites, they are often too cool for a textbook. That’s where paid stock photos come in handy: from cheaper but lower quality, like Dreamstime or ThinkStock, to pricier but better, like Getty or Alamy.

How Should the Photos Look?

High resolution is a given in print, and all of the stock photo websites do provide large images. It's different on the web, where loading time is important, so you have to balance out the quality of the photo and its file size. In jpg, the fewer colour changes in a photo the smaller size at the same quality. For example: the astronaut photo above is only 34 kB (all the black background), compared to 143 kB that the complex office building photo (above the astronaut) takes up. (Further reading: Expert opinion on big photos for the web from Aaron Brown.)

In textbook publishing, we generally don’t like blurry photos, including Instagram-style filters and those dreamy pictures with sunlight flashes or glare on windows. Another thing you won’t have to worry about on the web but might in print is black-and-white photos. A lot of books are still published in one colour, so when you pick pictures for them, make sure that what looks super vibrant in full colour (picture above) doesn’t turn into a grey blob in grayscale due to low contrast, like in the example below.

What to Avoid?

Depending on the purpose of your work, you might have to be careful about the content of the photos you select, in print or online. For example, university and college textbooks don’t want to promote alcohol consumption among students, so for a photo of a celebration we wouldn’t go for people clinking glasses of champagne but rather shaking hands, hugging, or clapping.

Another big no-no for most pictures is looking fake. As you browse through stock photos, you’ll notice that so many of them look extremely staged and posed, with models either grinning regardless of circumstances or forcing unconvincing face expressions. A lot of stock photos will make you cringe. So the big challenge is to find those that look as if they were taken in a real-life situation.

Let’s say I'm looking for a photo to show teamwork in an office environment. If it's for a textbook, it can't be too cool, so I'd have to wade through paid stock photo collections with gems such as hands pointing at turned off tablets or an awkward group high-five. I've discovered that the free photo collections have much better shots of people at work looking focused and natural. However, the majority of those people look like the creative, designer crowd, so they're not the easiest source for illustrating the conventional corporate environment. The photo below, from Unsplash, looked corporate enough, though, to make it to one of our business communication textbooks.

Creative Input

Photo research is by far my favourite thing to do at work. It's so much fun to scroll through hundreds of pictures and think up themes and associations, until you find the best candidates for the given title. It's pleasant to the eye and inspiring – as Bob Martin says in The Clean Coder, "creative output depends on creative input," so the more you've seen, the easier you'll come up with ideas for other projects, like I did with this website. (I probably spent more time selecting these photos and experimenting with their file sizes than I did writing the text.) Check out the free galleries. Maybe you'll find a perfect picture for your work. Just remember to credit the authors. Good luck, and have fun!