This is a Guest Post written by Justin Germino a technology blogger who works with WordPress and helps others with blogging tips.
Google has finally kept up to their promise of making images available to Google Drive users. They have added a free stock photo library to the documents portion of Google Drive when you create a new document. There are over 5,000 new images from Thinkstock in the stock photo library and you can search by subject to find the free images that you need, without exiting Google Drive.
How to access the free stock photo library on Google Drive
The 5,000 image library is easy to access once you understand how. These free stock photos can only be accessed when you start a new document or edit a document. The library cannot be accessed through the left hand margin before ‘creating'.
Open your Drive and in the left hand top corner you will see a button Create. Open create and pick the document you want to make.
Once you have opened your document, go to the tab insert and then image on the pull down menu. A pop up window will appear.
To access the free stock photo library, go to the menu item search in the left hand margin. You will be awarded three options, Google, Life and Stock Photos. The free stock photos are located under Stock Photos.
Use the search box t look through all 5,000 free photos that you can use in any of your documents.
Contributors to free stock photos on Google Drive
The free stock photos found on Google Drive are a crowd sourcing initiative instigated by Google. Over 6 months ago, they posted on their blog that they wanted Drive users to send in their favorite photos from Thinkstock. The Google community of users saw photo contributions as an opportunity and donated their own photos to the free stock photo option. The result is over 5,000 free photos on Google Drive for you use. How magical is that. IN a review of the quality of the free stock photos found on Google Drive, it seems the selection process from contributing photographers must have been rigorous, as the photos are great!
This is how our free stock images looks in the Google Drive presentation:
Who benefits from the free stock photos on Google Drive
Users of Drive and the numerous advantages of this desktop resource that can be accessed on the go, benefit from this library of over 5,000 free stock photos. As noted above, this library can only be accessed when you create or edit a Google Drive document in Google Drive. Don't have access to Drive yet? It is easy. All you need is a Gmail address to access Drive. Once you register your Gmail address through their sign up process, you can access Drive through the Google menu bar. as a cloud storage system you have additional benefits that other cloud storage systems do not have. You can create documents, share documents with others through Drive. You receive 5 GB of free storage but can access additional storage for as little as $2.50 usd per month. For the Drive user, you can now access over 5,000 stock photos through Drive without having to pay for storage.
You want to know where Google got the stock images from? Thinkstock, the subscription based stock agency of Getty Images, has provided all stock images for Google Drive. Compare Thinkstock to Shutterstock and other subscription based stock agencies here.
