In this tutorial, Shaun Whynacht of Blue Cow Marketing introduces Pexels.com as a free stock‑photo library ideal for digital marketers and small businesses. He explains how users can search for images, download them instantly, and use them for personal or commercial projects without cost. Whynacht outlines the site’s funding model—photographers contribute images for exposure, while users can support the platform via PayPal donations or sponsorships for premium content. He highlights the extensive tool ecosystem, including a Chrome extension, desktop apps for Mac and Windows, a Photoshop plugin, a Microsoft Office add‑in, and an IFTTT recipe for Android. Demonstrations of the Mac app and Photoshop extension show how to locate, favorite, copy, and insert images directly into design workflows. Throughout, he emphasizes the unrestricted commercial licensing, encourages viewers to create a free account, adopt the tools, and support the service, concluding with calls to subscribe and connect on social platforms.
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Hi, Shaun Whynacht with Blue Cow Marketing, back with another quick tutorial review, whatever you want to call it, here for a really exciting site that I came across here. Now, if you are doing any kind of digital marketing in your business, and you should be, one of the challenges you always come up against is great stock photography, and it can get costly if you're using some of those traditional stock sites that require you to buy credits. Well, introducing pexels.com. It, as it says there, the best free stock photos in one place, and I truly am impressed with what they're doing here. Now, just quickly to run through this, I'm going to show you some really cool tools that are part of it. But any, like, like any other stock photography site, you look for, you know, traditional things. Let's just look like family. We do a search here, you're going to come up with any, any photos that are related to that. So if you want one of those photos, it's really easy. Click on it. Download, and it's going to download right to your computer. Now you might say, how are they doing this for free? Well, a lot of the photos are being contributed for free just for people to get their names out there, but you can also donate to them if you really like what they're doing. You know, you would be spending hundreds of dollars on stock photography normally, and show them some love, keep them around by doing a PayPal donation here to the organization. Obviously it's not free for them to keep this site up and running, but they do have some sponsorship in here that you can get some premium photos and things like like that, but a great library of free stock photography that again, you can use for personal and commercial use. That's the key, commercial use if you're using this for your business. If you go back, you can download, you can discover popular photos, you can even contribute if you are a photographer. Now here's the really cool part that I like about this. Under Tools, they have extensions. They have a Chrome extension, they have a— app for Windows and Mac. They've got a Photoshop plugin, Microsoft Office add-in, and an If This Then That recipe for Android. Okay, two of the things I'm going to show you here in this tutorial that I'm absolutely enthralled with, in love with, and I think any one of our clients or even any small business out there that's doing any kind of marketing should do— you should get an account on here, it's free, sign up for it. Also get the apps for your computer, whether you're a Mac or Windows. So let's quickly take a look at the app for Mac. So I already have it installed, we're not going to go through that process. But once you install it, you'll ask you to log in. Again, it's free. And then this little pop-up shows up here and you can do your search. So let's just say we're looking for dogs, right? There's a lot of cool photos here for dogs, right? Let's say you want this photo, you can go ahead and click download and it will download it right away. If you want to copy to your clipboard, you can go ahead and do that as well. The little hearts, you can obviously love them and add them to your favorites. So it's a really light app that gives you a ton of power. All right, so we're not done there. I'm going to show you, for you Photoshop users that do a lot of work in Photoshop, once you install this extension, shows up here under the extensions, little Pexels icon. And you can go ahead and let's just look for cats now. Okay, there's some photos of cats. We want to then work with this photo. Say this is the photo we want to work for in an ad. Click the insert Downloads, opens it right away in Photoshop. You can then start to work with that photo. Again, you have full personal and commercial rights to these photos. So again, it's, it's phenomenal. I love this site, pexels.com. Check it out for your small business, and thanks for watching. If you like what you see here, by all means show us some love and subscribe to our Blue Cow Marketing YouTube channel. If you're watching this on Facebook, like our page, and if you're watching this on LinkedIn, please by all means connect with me. I'd love to hear from you. Thanks for watching.
