Images are probably the most important resource on your website, and when you start your marketplace or classifieds site, you need to make it look professional, to achieve this you must use good quality images.
When you use the right images, you can make your products more attractive and improve your customer's experience, so they can spend more time interacting on your website.
Sometimes you can make your images by taking pictures or by hiring a photographer, and other times it is better to get images from the internet (you have to be very careful at this part).
We have some tips for you, so you can improve your website.
Taking Your Own Pictures
If you have a website that sells physical products where you have access and handle them; and of course, if you know how to take pictures, edit, and work with it, it is not a bad idea to start making your images for your web.
You are going to need:
- A Camera
- A tripod
- A Table
- A white background
- White bounce cards
- Some tape (if you need it)
- And a perfect room where you can work
This will cost you some money, but you will be able to choose how the images will look by making them to your liking. On Youtube, you can find a lot of tutorials about product photography if you need them.
Hiring A Professional Photographer
Hiring a photographer is a common and a perfect choice for websites of Restaurants, Bars, Hotels, Real Estate, etc. Of course, a professional photographer charges high prices, but you will get your high-quality images, and both you and your customers will be happy with the results.
You can search for a local photographer or, search on the web for e-commerce photography services.
You must choose if having your original images will be worth it for your website.
Images From Internet
On the internet you can find millions of images, just by typing on a search engine like Google Images what you're looking for and, in the blink of an eye, all the images you can imagine, BUT, most of the images there are protected by copyright and, if you use one of them without the correct permission, well, you will be breaking the law. Fortunately, you are here reading this, so, we have some alternatives for you.
Free Images
There are websites on the Internet that offers completely free images they are called free image banks, where you can get free images for both personal and commercial use, sometimes with some images you will have to mention the creator of the image, but that's it.
We recommend you to read all the licenses of all the images you will use, just to make sure that there's no hidden copyright or another requirement of thanks. Here we listed some of these websites.
Paid/Premium Images
We are talking about those websites that offer millions of high-quality and premium images, there you can find images from 0,5$, the cost of the images will depend on the use that will be given to them and the size of the images.
Some of the previous websites also offer paid images. Here, are some of these premium sites:
Creative Commons License (CC0)
For last, you can find good-quality images with something called a Creative Commons license, this is part of a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting access and culture exchange.
You should consider that there are different Creative Commons licenses, we recommend you check what type of license the image has.
Some of these websites are:
What each image source actually allows in 2026
A classifieds or marketplace site is a commercial website. So the question is not only whether an image is free to download, but whether its licence allows commercial use. The big free libraries now use their own licences rather than plain CC0, and they all have limits. Here is what their licence pages said when we checked them in October 2026:
| Source | Licence | Commercial use | Credit required | Main restrictions |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pixabay | Pixabay Content License | Yes | No (appreciated) | No selling or distributing unmodified copies. No misleading or deceptive use. No immoral or illegal use, especially of recognisable people. No commercial use of trademarks or logos shown in the image. Not usable as a trademark or business name. |
| Pexels | Pexels License | Yes | No (appreciated) | No suggesting that people or brands in the photo endorse you. No showing identifiable people in a bad light. No selling unaltered copies as prints or products. No redistributing on other stock sites. Not usable as a trademark. |
| Unsplash | Unsplash License (paid Unsplash+ has separate terms) | Yes | No (appreciated) | No selling images without significant changes. No building a similar or competing image service. |
| ISO Republic | CC0 | Yes | No (encouraged) | Few, but you still need to check for trademarks, recognisable people and private property. |
| Flickr | Varies per photo | Only for some licences | Usually yes (all "BY" licences) | Each photo keeps its owner's licence. Photos without a CC licence are all rights reserved. |
Flickr needs the most care. Its own count shows about 329 million Creative Commons photos under NonCommercial (NC) licences, across the 2.0 and 4.0 versions of BY-NC, BY-NC-SA and BY-NC-ND. You cannot use those on a business site. Fewer than 25 million of its photos are CC0 or Public Domain Mark. If you use a Flickr photo under CC BY or CC BY-SA, put the credit the licence asks for next to the image. Also note that Fotolia, listed above, no longer exists: fotolia.com now redirects to Adobe Stock.
A practical checklist for marketplace images
- Use stock photos for your own pages only (home page banner, category images, blog). Listing photos should be the seller's own photos of the actual item. A stock photo on a listing misleads buyers, and the Pixabay licence forbids misleading or deceptive use.
- Keep a record of where each image came from and its licence on the day you downloaded it, because licence terms can change.
- Watch for logos, brands and faces. A free licence covers the photographer's copyright, not the trademarks or the people in the picture.
- Use formats Google can read. Google's image SEO guide (updated 2 March 2026) supports JPEG, PNG, WebP, AVIF, GIF, BMP and SVG. It recommends high-quality images that are still optimised for speed,
srcsetor<picture>for responsive images (with a plainsrcas a fallback), and descriptive alt text without keyword stuffing.
On a Yclas site, listing photos are resized for phones automatically. You can choose how many photos each listing may have and what size they are uploaded at (see the image settings guide below).
For last, with YCLAS you can Configure The Image Settings to the uploaded images, you will be able to set some image parameters on your Classifieds/Marketplace site.
¡It is time for you to make your website looks as it has to!
Let us know if these tips help you.
Regards,
YCLAS team.
