Information
The following is for finding images with broken links.
First, it's worth noting that, if you're here because you've found a "best of" option(s) of interest, you have very likely already avoided significant time and tedious hassle searching within and across sites.
The commercial art industry reality is, however, that sometimes the best options change locations. Could be caused by a creator or rights holder(s) deciding to move to another site for more generous terms. Coud be a license agreement expired and was not renewed, or one source site aquired another and the URL(s) had to change. It could also be a site went out of business, which has happened several times in the past decade. The reason a link is not working could also be a simple technical issue that's easily fixed. The good news, if you’re still interested, is that the image exists; here’s what you can do to try and find it again from here.
- Most source sites have very helpful search support staff - contact them to see if the image(s) is still available.
- Another option, if the link has descriptive content detail within it, is to copy and paste the descriptive text into a new open Internet search (just the descriptive text, without the URL). Such searches often turn up the image in question at the top of the first page of search results because they’ve previously been indexed by search engines.
- Another Internet search option exists when the artist, studio or source name is placed on the thumbnail image and / or in the url. Doing a search using (just) such text can often put you in contact with the originator(s), if not the image itself on their site.
- An additional powerful option is to save the thumbnail image to your desktop (right click, save as) and do a Google or TinEye reverse image search. This enables you to review other locations where the image lives or has lived; often including a source site where you can still buy or license it.
We tell you the above because having the right image leads to the best outcomes; finding it is almost always worth the effort.
Worst case, if this image can’t be located presently, you can still use it for inspiration to help you find, or create, the best alternative.
Even with such occasional circumstances, we are far and away the most efficient and effective resource for you to be able to do your best work. We also believe these relatively rare situations will become fewer and fewer and will over time be addressed by source sites in conjunction with artists, rights holders, and ourselves. Original images in demand can easily come back on the market. Just takes the rights holder to be aware of the interest, and to say yes.
In short, in a world of billions, we are still very much, and will always be, a site for sore eyes.