The Ultimate Guide for Finding and Editing Images for Your Medical Website

The right images are key to your marketing communication

Visual aids are a key part of your internet marketing and your marketing communication. Establishing a brand online is best done with a combination of engaging copy and striking photos. Appropriate imagery will always serve to enhance your brand through expert tagging, descriptions, and search engine optimization. You will find this guide particularly useful if you are running an online blog for your medical company and are on the lookout of new pictures and images you could use.

Image Copy Rights

Images are grouped into three main categories when it comes to privacy:

• Public domain images are by far the simplest images to deal with. When an image, piece of writing, or other work of art are in the public domain, that means that anyone can use it without permission and without citing or back linking it.
• Right-protected images on the other hand cannot be used except with the photographer’s express permission. There are many sites such as comfight, or flickr which photographers share pictures in exchange for attribution but with no fee involved.
• Royalty-free images will provide you with a more permanent solution. When you purchase these images you receive permission to use them indefinitely for your purposes. Royalty free websites which we frequently use include istockphoto.com, and 123rf.com.

Where you can find top medical and life sciences images

You can find tons of usable images, many in the public domain and free use category, at the sites summarized below.

1 – Springer Images hosts a collection of valuable medical, technology, and science images that you can glean from. The images are mostly public domain, with some requiring you to get permission from the author. The medical content that you find at this site is great for publishing, advertising, and researching.

2 – Wellcome Trust has a selection of strictly medical images that you can use freely. You can find many images dealing with healthcare and biomedicine. They may be modern day photos or historical drawings.

4 – Wikipedia (Medical) can help you find the journals, pages, and other common collections across the web. Use it to track down medical pictures according to category. Browse through categories of medicine, history, drugs, doctors, medical equipment, and more.

5 – National Library of Medicine is the world’s biggest medical library. Located in the U.S., it provides researchers and advertisers with an extensive listing of medical resources. Biomedicine and other topics are also covered. You can search through the library online or you can visit it in person to pick up a printed copy of an image.

Additional reading:

4 Sources for Finding FREE Medical Pictures, Painlessly

Additional Sources for Free Medical Images and Pictures 

How to prepare images for your medical website

#1 Compress a picture or image to make your website load faster

Compress your image down to a reasonable size so that it shows up optimally on your website and allows your website to load quickly. There is nothing more frustrating for a physician that wants to learn more about your technology and has to wait for your site to load. People in general have become inpatient and intolerant with websites that load slowly. Your site should be online in less than 7 seconds.

There is a free tool you can use, called jpeg-optimizer to produce the compression results that you want.

Using jpeg-optimizer is easy: You simply click ‘browse’ and choose the digital image that you want to alter. The default compression will probably be 65, though you have a range to choose from, between 0-99. The lower compression you choose, the lower its quality. The higher the compression, the larger the file, and higher its quality. You may have to experience a couple of trial and errors before you find the version that you like.

#2 Edit your pictures to make them more exciting

Pixlr.com allows you to edit your medical pictures online for free. Adjust the width or the length of the image to the desired size and watch as the complete picture editor site presents you with a proportional version of it. You have three editing workshops to choose from – Editor, Express, and O-Matic. The Editor workshop allows you to alter a picture in all of the typical ways such as cropping, resizing, rotating, adjusting color, and more. You can upgrade your editing experience a bit by using Express, which offers you the option of creating collages with the pictures that you take off your hard drive, online site, or even your webcam. With O-Matic you have three steps to go through – the first provides you an all-encompassing choice of colorations. The second is a choice of texture effects ranging from paint, glass, and parchment, to metal and formal. The third is a selection of appropriate borders.

#3 Make search engines notice your images and improve your ranking

When you search engine optimize your image, you are telling search engines what your medical images are about. There is no point in adding a picture or image to your medical website that is not optimized for search engines. WordPress allows you to keyword optimize the pictures very easily.

Once you upload your picture to the image gallery you will see the following screen. Here are the more important fields you should consider filling:

1.  Image title: This is an important component for SEO. The file name that you give your image will automatically be added here. Make sure that you name your file with relevant keywords.
2. Alternative Text: This is more commonly known as ‘alt text’ or the ‘alt tag’. It should contain a brief description of the image. This is highly important. You can copy and pa
3. Description: This is probably not as important to search engines as it used to be but it can help a bit. Make sure that it contains the relevant key words.
4. Link URL: The end of your link URL will be the original filename of your image. So before uploading the image, it won’t hurt to make sure the filename contains the main keyword for your WordPress page or post (filename appears under the hashtag picture on top).

Picture by woodleywonderworks