Information
The following is for images with broken links.
First it's worth noting that, if you've found a "best of" option(s) of interest, you've likely already avoided significant time and tedious hassle searching within and across sites.
The commercial image industry reality is however that sometimes the best options change locations. Could be caused by a creator, rights holder, or source site deciding to move to another site for more generous terms. Coud be a license agreement expired. Or one source site aquired another. Or one went out of business. The reason a link is not working could also be a technical issue. The good news, if you’re still interested, is that the image does exist; here’s what you can do to try and find it.
- Most source sites have search support staff - contact them for tech support, or to help you track down where the image went and if it is still available elsewhere.
- Another option, if the link has descriptive content detail within it, is to copy and paste the descriptive text into a new open Internet search (just the descriptive text, without the URL). Such searches often turn up the image in question at the top of the first page of search results because they’ve previously been indexed by search engines.
- Another Internet search option exists when the artist, studio or source name is placed on the thumbnail image and / or in the url. Doing a search using (just) such text can often put you in contact with the originator(s), if not the image itself on their site.
- An additional option is to save the thumbnail image to your desktop (right click, save as) and do a Google or TinEye reverse image search. This enables you to review other locations where the image lives / has lived, and where you might still be able to buy or license it.
We tell you the above because having the right image leads to the best outcomes; finding it is almost always worth the effort.
Worst case, if this image can’t be located, you can still use it for inspiration to help you find, or create, the best alternative.
Even with such occasional circumstances, we are far and away the most efficient and effective resource for you to be able to do your best work. We also believe these relatively rare situations will become fewer and fewer and will over time be addressed by source sites in conjunction with artists, rights holders, and ourselves. Original images in demand can easily come back on the market. Just takes the rights holder to be aware of the interest, and to say yes. In short, in a world of billions, we are still very much, and will always be, a site for sore eyes.