Get Bigger Preview Files from Stock Photo Sites

There are probably a variety of applications for this little hack, but I primarily use it when experimenting with banner images and whatnot on a client site.

I fully intend to buy an image before I use it, but it would be great if my client and I could see what it will look like first – and using a 300px wide image in a homepage banner doesn’t really satisfy.

Here’s how you can get a much bigger preview image (most of the time)

  1. Find your desired image(s) on a stock photography site (my favourite is bigstock.com)
  2. Download the preview image (or use something like Greenshot to grab the image from the page)
  3. Go to http://images.google.com/ and click the little camera icon
  4. Upload the preview image or screenshot
  5. Google will show you many instances of that image elsewhere on the web (ie. other people who have bought and implemented that image)
  6. Browse for the biggest version you can find!

This won’t work 100% of the time, but it probably works more often than you’d expect!

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