Copy and paste pictures to earn Money
You know, I’ve said it before, but I will say it again. Free, free, free. Everybody loves free. Hey, everyone, and welcome back. That's right. Today, I'm writing an updated article, showing you how anyone can copy free pictures from the internet and then resell them to earn money online by selling them onto a range of different products, such as posters, mugs, pillowcases, and even phone cases. But in this tutorial, I'll also be showing you some brand-new websites that you can use to find free pictures that you can then copy and resell to make money online and reveal some new tips, tricks, and strategies and case studies of people successfully using this method to earn cash legally. And that word "legally" is very important, because you see, here's the thing, right? You cannot just come and copy any picture you find on the internet and then sell it. So for example, if I came and thought, hey, Elsa from "Frozen," that's a pretty popular character. I'll just find a picture of her on the internet and then sell it as a poster to "Frozen" Elsa fans, well, I'd probably get a cease-and-desist letter and perhaps even a lawsuit. Why? Well, it's because this picture has what is called copyright protection. Basically, whenever you draw or paint a picture, it is instantly protected by law with copyright. You don't have to register for it. It is instant. Copyright protection means that only you have the legal right to use your art, including for commercial purposes.
And so, of course, Disney owns the copyright to this, so early they can use her image. However, the thing about copyright protection is it doesn't last forever, which is why Disney themselves love using public domain works of art, such as "Alice in Wonderland" in their creations. Yep, eventually, once someone dies, their work will become part of the public domain. Copyright protection only lasts for a limited time, and this is done for a good reason. It's because making artwork part of the public domain eventually aids and creativity and inspiration for future creations. And so the public domain is simply a term to refer to any art that no longer has any copyright protections on it, either because the artists themselves have chosen to waive it or because it has expired. So, for example, a common question people have is this: Can I sell posters featuring the Mona Lisa? And the answer is, yes. Yes, you legally can, because copyright protection on the Mona Lisa image has expired and is now in the public domain. And so what some very generous and talented photographers and image editors have done is they've taken photographs of popular historical paintings and produced stunning, high-definition reproduction pictures of these works of art and have uploaded them to the internet.
And courts throughout the USA and Europe have determined that these replica pictures are also part of the public domain because they do not meet the threshold of originality, which is required for a photo to be protected under copyright, which means then that you are allowed to legally take this reproduction photo of the Mona Lisa which has been uploaded to Wikipedia and sell it onto all sorts of merchandise. And yes, later on in this article, I will show you lots of different and creative ways that people are doing this as a free fun side hustle to earn extra cash on the side each month. Woo hoo. But first, as promised, let me show you four websites that you can use to find this artwork. And of course, one of those websites is Wikipedia. Now, if you come to Wikipedia and do a search for a famous historical artist, chances are, on their Wikipedia page, you will find reproduction photo images in high quality that you can download and print onto products for free. The biggest issue with Wikipedia, though, is that it's slow because you have to know who you're searching for, and so a much faster way to browse through the amazing paintings on Wikipedia is to use this second awesome website here, free-images.com. This is a huge directory that locates and stores public domain images from around the web.
So come to the search engine and switch it to search for fine art and then type in what type of pictures you want. So for example, if you wanted to create a cool flower pillowcase, which, again, I'll show you how to do later in the article, you can come here and do a search for flowers, and now you'll get a bunch of amazing public domain art to choose from. And if you open up an image, you'll see that it will have a link to its original source, which is usually Wikipedia for fine art, which you can then click to open up and find out more information about the painting, such as who made it, and you'll be able to download it in a range of sizes, including its original high-definition version. So that's the second website I highly recommend. My third website will be one that my long-time subscribers will probably recognize, and that website is rawpixel.com. I absolutely love Rawpixel. So this is also a large image directory, although, unlike free-images.com, not all of these photos on here are in the public domain. Here, you will find two types of pictures. The first is pictures that Rawpixel's artists have created, and these are not in the public domain. You can tell by clicking on a picture and then seeing the license information. I like this picture here, it says it has a royalty-free license, which means that it has a picture that Rawpixel's artists have created, which also means then that it has Rawpixel's royalty-free license, which includes rules and restrictions, including a restriction that you cannot print it onto products. But remember, that is just one type of image that you will find on the website.
The other is a stunning collection of 100% free public domain pictures, including some very high-definition replicas of famous paintings. To access these, come to the top menu and click on the Public Domain button to access their public domain collection, not the Rawpixel collection. Here you can browse through, and all of these images here are in high definition, 300 DPI, which is awesome for printing, and you'll find all sorts of super cool images on here. So, for example, you think about it. For someone interested in Japanese culture and art, this picture, would look pretty awesome on a poster, don't you think? And as you can see, in the license information, it doesn't say that it has a royalty-free image license, and instead, it says that it has a public domain image license, which means that this picture does not have a royalty-free license rule. Instead, it is the public domain rules that apply to it, which, of course, means that you are welcome to reuse it and sell it onto products. And so this was probably the biggest reason why I wanted to remake this article. It was to ask the questions that people had about these two licenses. They are very different. And there is one more website that I absolutely love for finding cool free public domain art, but you must know the trick for how to use this website correctly, and that website is the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
They have released over 400,000 stunning art replica photos in the public domain. Given that the MET Museum is literally the largest fine art museum in the world, you can imagine that you have some extremely famous pieces to choose from on here, like "The Dance Class." But here's my challenge to you. Instead of finding popular pieces to resell, my challenge to you is to browse through here and find some lesser-known pieces that people with niche interests and hobbies would still be interested in buying today if they discovered them. For example, let's say that you wanted to find a cool picture of the ocean to sell to people like divers who have a niche interest related to the ocean. When you first come here and enter in the ocean as a search phrase, and when you do that, you will see that you will get tons of images of all sorts of art, including statues and vases, and so the trick is to come to the search bar and filter the results to specifically looking for paintings, and now, you'll be able to see what historical paintings they have available. And again, so many of these are absolutely timeless. For example, someone who was interested in the ocean would still find this painting very cool to have on merchandise, like a poster or a phone case even today. And so if you wanted to download it, you just click on the download button, which will take you to a full-size image of the painting, and then you can right-click it and download it. But here's the thing.
We now know then how to find lots of cool timeless paintings that we can legally resell onto products. But here's the question. How do you do this to earn money? Well, my friend, let me show you case studies of people who are successfully doing this to hopefully inspire you to come up with your own creative ways on how you can do this, too. And one of the best websites to find these case studies is Redbubble. Now, while I know my longtime subscribers will definitely know what Redbubble is, the truth is most of my viewers are new around here, so I will quickly explain what it is for those viewers. Now, Redbubble is a website that lets you upload pictures for free and sell them onto merchandise like prints, stickers, and phone cases, also for free. So here's how it works. First, you create a free account with Redbubble. Next, you upload the picture that you want to sell, and you give it a title, relevant keywords as tags, and a description. After that, you then browse through Redbubble's products that they can print your picture onto and choose the ones that you think will look best on. You can edit your picture on each product and get it looking the way that you want it to. And then you save them. Redbubble will now create product pages on its website for each of the products that you created. Every month, Redbubble gets tens of millions of visits from customers who are coming here looking to find cool products featuring awesome niche art that they couldn't find in a big chain store.
But within minutes, your product pages will be live, and the customers will be able to come and find your pictures to buy on the products that you chose. And then each time that a customer does come and, say, buys one of these items, one of Redbubble's print shops will then print your design onto the product, package it up, and then ship it out to the customer. They'll collect the money the customer paid, and then remove their production fees, and then pay you the profit as a commission. Last year, Redbubble made over $400 million selling merchandise on behalf of the users, such as my viewers here, so it can be a really nice side hustle to bring in extra cash each month. Congratulations, everybody. In the e-commerce industry, we call Redbubble a print-on-demand website because that's exactly what it is. It is printing products on-demand as customers order them. And if you'd like to learn more about how I and others run our print-on-demand stores online, you should be sure to download my free ebook, "The 6 Steps That 6-Figure Online Stores Follow to Make Over $10,000 a month," and you'll finally download my free ebook in the article description below. But anyway, back to the article and onto the first case study. So on Redbubble, one of the most popular types of posters is cool Japanese art.
Well, if we do a search for Japanese art posters, Redbubble will show us some of its top-selling and trending poster designs, and if you look through these results, you'll see that several of these are historical paintings that are now in the public domain. For example, take this awesome poster here. This poster is part of a woodblock set that is now available to be downloaded for free because it is, of course, in the public domain. Even though this painting is old, it's still relevant today to anyone interested in Japanese art, history, and culture. It's still super cool, and so, in my opinion, that's the best type of art to sell. It's the type of art where people are unlikely to have ever seen it before, but when the right customer sees it, they go, "Oh man, that's really neat. I want to buy it." And so, in my opinion, this is the biggest opportunity when it comes to selling historical art. So, for example, if we come and do a search for flower posters, we will find that the top trending poster design, isn't a super famous painting like Van Gogh's "Irises." Instead, it is a painting that most people probably won't recognize. It's a niche painting of a bunch of different flowers and plants that are from an old encyclopedia that is now in the public domain, and the painting can now be downloaded for free on Wikipedia like I showed you how to do earlier. But you know what?
To someone interested in plants, this painting would still be super cool as a poster on their wall, even if they don't recognize who made it, although sometimes, famous paintings can still be a great choice depending on the audience that you're targeting. So for example, if we come back to Redbubble and do a search for a very trendy type of art on Redbubble, gothic art, we will see that one of the top trending pictures right now is indeed the very famous historical painting from Vincent van Gogh, "The Skull with the Burning Cigarette," which, of course, you could easily go download for free from free-images.com in high definition. So sometimes the famous pieces are indeed the best to sell. Now, just to clarify, Redbubble is most certainly not the only website where people are taking public domain images and then turning them into super cool products and then making money online with them. No. For example, if you come on over to Etsy, you will see that lots of people are taking public domain paintings and selling them onto print-on-demand products. So for example, van Gogh's artwork is very popular here, and van Gogh's face masks have been especially popular. So it's not just Redbubble people who are doing this.
There are plenty of other people on other websites doing it, too, although if you are reading this article and you're thinking that repurposing free public domain art to sell with print-on-demand products sound great, whether it be on Etsy or Redbubble, my advice to you would be to read that website's terms and conditions first, because keep in mind that just because it's legal to sell public domain art, it doesn't mean that a website like Redbubble can't choose to restrict how they are to be used on their private website. And also keep in mind, rules can change, so the rules today might not be the same as when you were reading this article later. And so I strongly recommend that you've read the rules today and I will link to them in the article description below. And so when I read over these rules, the way that I understood them was that if you were to upload the exact same picture as someone else, yours would be considered a copy of theirs, which isn't allowed. And so while you may indeed see examples of people who have just downloaded free pictures from the internet and then reuploaded them without making any changes, nevertheless, be original, and you can be original in two ways. The first thing to do is to find obscure art that no one else has uploaded before, and the second thing to do is to think about ways that you can take free public domain pictures, and then combine them with your own elements to turn them into something new.
For example, you will see a lot of different versions of van Gogh's "Skull with Cigarette" on Redbubble, but as you can see, people have modified the picture, and they've turned it into new versions. Some have removed the background. Some have changed the colors of the picture. Some have changed the style and they've turned it into a drawing instead of a painting. This means that theirs is now original, not a copy. So, for example, the way that this Redbubble store did it with this image was they turned it into a high-definition version with new colors and digitally restored it. And actually, you know what? Digitally restoring a picture or remastering it is a format within itself. And digitally restoring pictures or remastering them is a really great way to turn pictures that nobody would want to buy into something that people would love, and the best thing is that you can do this all for free in less than a minute, all online. So, for example, let's take this very cool Japanese woodblock painting of an actor that is dressed as a samurai. Well, to someone interested in Japanese culture, history, and samurais, this is really neat and timeless.
The only problem, though, is that it's now faded and has this big, ugly gray border around it, so nobody would want to print it in its current form onto a poster. So let's restore it, shall we? Come to this free website here, Photo Filters, and upload the picture that you want to restore and select their auto-correct option. Now, it's gonna make those washed-out colors instantly pop, so there's that color correction done. Next, let's turn it into a high-definition version of itself by coming to the blur/sharpen feature, and we are going to bump up the sharpness a bit to make the details in the painting pop a bit. And then finally, to finish off our remaster, we need to get rid of that gray border around the poster, which we can do again for free by using the crop feature to remove it. And then, boom. In less than a minute, I have taken this old, forgotten picture, and I have digitally restored it and remastered it, and in the process, also turned it into something new. And using this website here, TinEye can really help you see if you're creating something new or just copying what others have already done. Tineye is a reverse image search. You can upload a picture to it, and it will scour the internet to see if it can find similar pictures that have been uploaded to other websites. And well, as you can imagine, since this is a very famous picture, it has been uploaded a bunch of times.
And so if you want to check for a particular website, you can come in and search for it directly. So yes, using this, we can see, as we already knew already, that lots of people are trying to sell this picture on Redbubble, whereas if we come back to TinEye, but this time do a reverse image search for that obscure Japanese woodblock painting, unsurprisingly, this has not been anywhere near as popular, and very few people are sharing this, let alone selling this online. And so I hope that this article here has helped you come up with some creative ideas for how you could take old, forgotten free pictures and then remaster them into something new that adds joy into people's lives today. So then, did my article inspire you? If it did, please hit Subscribe and Click the little notification bell, so you don't miss out on any of my articles, and if you'd like to learn more ways to make money online for free, you should be sure to read my article, "100 Websites and Apps that You Can Use to Make Money Online for Free." So go ahead, read my next article, and I'll see you over there.
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