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Images

In general, it's recommended images for university materials, especially high profile or externally available content, should be provided by the university photography service. This is part of AV services and is free for any university service to make use of. If you do want​​ to use your own photos, please read the guidance on taking suitable photos to fit in with the university style. Also always ensure that when you are using images of people that you have some form of written consent from them, and that they have the right to withdraw this consent at any time. This is especially important when using images to illustrate controversial subjects: For example bullying or abuse: In these cases it is safer to use images where the subjects cannot be identified. 

Where to find images

​University Photographer

Email sally.trussler@brunel.ac.uk to book specific events, or to request a particular image from the university database. When booking events, please try to give as much notice as possible and be aware that services around key university events like graduation are limited. 

​Flickr gallery

The university Flickr gallery includes a collection of high resolution images licensed under Creative Commons, which means that anyone is free to download, edit and adapt them, provided it's not for commercial purposes. This is an excellent resource if external partners ask for good quality images of the university. 

View the Gallery

Co​lourbox

CMSR has a subscription to colourbox.com - should you have trouble finding a suitable image you can search the Colourbox library then request the image by emailing communications@brunel.ac.uk. We only have a limited amount of downloads per month, so reserve the right to limit file access in the case of overuse. Students can apply for a free Colourbox account using our license key, which allows them to use images for coursework and student media/projects, provided they are completely non-commercial. 

Google

You are not allowed to steal images from Google. Yes it's easy but please don't do it, especially for external resources. Google, Wikimedia, Flickr and other services offer image searches through creative commons - this is a license that allows free use of images in return for attribution. There are several versions of creative commons license, so please check you are aware of the ones an image is offered under before using it.  

Notes
  • High resolution images. If dealing with external agencies you will often be asked to provide a 'high res image' - this refers to the DPI (dots per inch) of the photo, and is not related to the dimensions. The higher the DPI, the larger the image. Most image editing packages can give you the resolution of a photo, but a good rule of thumb is that the file size is less than a megabyte it's unlikely to be high res. All photos provided by the university photographers will have a high res version.
  • For professional quality printing, images should generally be a minimum of 300 dpi and for very large projects like banners may need to be larger 
  • For the web, images are measured purely by height and width, so dpi is not relevant. By default Adobe software and other programmes will save web images at 72dpi resolution, but dpi has no effect on image quality on screen - however if you take images off the web and print them, this explains why they often appear smaller and/or pixelated. 
  • Images for the web should be made as small as possible while still being of good quality - Using a 6mb image on a web page will have the same impact on the speed of the page as would tying an elephant on the back of a pizza delivery scooter. 
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