Google indexes images well and you can drill down to find the best image for almost any imaginable purpose (and a few that are best left to someone else’s imagination, but that’s another story).

But can you legally use Google images on your website?

The quick answer is “maybe”.

But you need to do a fair bit of research and you can’t necessarily take Google’s word for what is usable and what isn’t.

Like everything else it indexes, Google has to do a lot of work to decide what to show and how to categorise things.

And where images are concerned, it’s not always easy to work out what rights – if any – are available.

By no means every place shown in Google images credits where they got the photo from.

For instance, I don’t put in credits on the various sites I own.

Usually because I’m using royalty free images that don’t require any attribution.

I get the images from a variety of places:

• Stock Exchange – this has a mixture of licences and also includes paid-for stock photos.
• Fotolia – one of many paid-for stock photo sites. It’s good but you need to be using a reasonable number of photos, otherwise your credits expire.
• Wikimedia Commons – another source of royalty free images but with a mixture of licences.

The key thing with images is that the copyright normally stays with the person making the image.

So photographers have the right to those photos they took, even if you subsequently got charged for the photos.

Which means that wedding photos, baby photos, etc all have their copyright owned by the person holding the camera unless they’ve explicitly opted out of that. Just buying a photograph doesn’t automatically grant you copyright.

It also explains some other weird things – a TV show I watched a while back pixelated out a T-shirt because the image on the shirt was the cover from David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane album and they hadn’t got the television rights to show the image.

It really does get complicated.

Which means that simply copying an image from Google images is not a good idea.

The original copyright owner can – and often will – approach you and ask for the royalties they’ve been denied.

Some of the messages their lawyers send out are not pleasant to receive. They’re the legal equivalent of demanding money with menaces. But they’re legal and the copyright owner is well within their rights to demand money.

It’s not a defence to say “I got it from the internet” or that the site where you got it from claimed it was royalty free.

The reason I like Stock Exchange is that it’s owned by Getty Images – one of the largest photo libraries in the world – so I feel I’ve got a good enough degree of protection.

But I would be much more cautious about the provenance of images from elsewhere if they were just free from some anonymous site.

And, personally, I wouldn’t use any images I found on Google images unless they were clearly available on a large, heavily indexed, royalty free image site. So maybe the occasional tick or cross, very little else.

It’s just a lot, lot, lot safer to get images from dedicated royalty free image sites.

It’s often a lot easier to search those sites as well as the images are tagged to help you track down precisely the images you want.