It can be difficult to find good images to use on your web site. It is worth the effort of finding them because they can add credibility and professionalism. This helps build visitor confidence in your site which will help convert them into customers.

If you've ever tried locating good useable images, you know how tedious it can be. Once you do find a good photo, you either have to pay a large fee or it is copyrighted and you can't use it.

I have finally found an excellent solution which I can recommend.

Hemera Photos

Hemera is a pretty well known name for royalty free photos. They sell CD and DVD compilations with thousands of images and clipart that you can use online.

In the past I have purchased at couple of their collections which run in the $69 range. They are good quality products, but truthfully the CD's were kind of a pain. They came with 8 CD's and I would have to keep swapping them in order to get the image I want. Hemera addressed this by offering the photos on DVD which have a much larger capacity.

Hemera GraphicsDesk

Instead of all of the swapping around of disks, I discovered a more practical solution for me. It isn't free but it is one of the least expensive options I have found. (Other sites can charge you literally hundreds of dollars for one royalty free image!). This is no where near that expensive.

It is the recently introduced Hemera Graphicsdesk program. It works like this:

• Download the free Graphicsdesk software from the site and install it
• Once it is running, enter a search word or phrase for the type of photo you are looking for. In the case below, I searched for "smile".

• You can try looking through the free samples that they offer but these are limited. Your best bet is signing up for the image collection that is right for you. I signed up for the business collection for one year's worth of access. That may be overkill for you so they offer one week's worth of unlimited access to the photos.
• Choose the photo you want to preview by clicking on it once. It will then appear in the preview window.
• Click on the photo twice and it will appear in the export picture window.
• Resize, crop, and even flip the photo before you export it into the file format of your choice.

The Hemera Graphicsdesk is a great resource to have available at a very reasonable price.

Online Video Overview

I have produced a small flash video showing an overview of the Hemera Graphics desk. The video is a 1.79mb Flash movie located on the next page. You can view this video by clicking here or pressing "Next >>" below.

This video is 1.79mb in size. If you have a dial up modem, it may take a minute to download. Faster connections will see it in a couple of seconds.