Every blog post, every newsletter, every slide deck needs a picture. The free photo sites exist, but there are dozens of them now, each with its own license quirks and its own strengths, and most people just bookmark one and settle.
The result is that everyone's website has the same photo of a laptop next to a coffee cup.
The idea is a curated directory of free to use photograph sources in Google Sheets, organized by what each site is actually good for. It's one of my 100 business ideas in Google Sheets, and it's a good fit for anyone who has spent too many hours hunting for the right image.
The idea
Create an interactive info product designed to help individuals and businesses find high quality, free to use photographs for their projects. The heart of it is a directory of the great sites and which ones are best for which uses. Food photography, architecture, diverse people, textures, illustrations that aren't photos at all.
A person familiar with photography and with these sites can simply curate the list and editorialize the categories so they're easy to use. The editorializing is the product. A note like "great for food, commercial use allowed, no attribution needed, search is weak so browse the collections instead" saves someone twenty minutes every time they need an image.
People with experience in graphic design, marketing, or content creation have the skills to build this, because they've already done the searching and they know the license traps.
Beyond finding photographs, include use cases and how the sites have been used by others. Interviews can be conducted simply by email. Ask a few designers or marketers where they get images and how they use them, and put screenshots of the finished work next to each short case study. It turns a list of links into a set of stories.
Also include resources and tools to manipulate or package the photos for use. Canva and Photopea for editing, plus the social media style apps for cropping and captions. Not just web based tools, but mobile apps too, because a lot of people are building their content on a phone.
Monetization can be as simple as selling the sheet, or offering affiliate links for the paid tools you recommend alongside the free ones.
How to build it in Google Sheets
- Sites. One row per source. Columns: Site, Link, Best For (a list of tags), License Type, Attribution Required, Commercial Use OK, Search Quality (1 to 5), Library Size, Notes, Last Checked.
- Finder. A dropdown for Use Case (food, people, nature, tech, abstract, and so on) and a checkbox for Commercial Use Only, with a FILTER showing the matching sites ranked by Search Quality.
- Case Studies. Columns: Who, What They Made, Site Used, Screenshot Link, Quote, Tip.
- Tools. Editing and packaging tools. Columns: Tool, Platform (web, iOS, Android), Free or Paid, Best For, Link.
- License Cheat Sheet. A plain English explanation of each license type that shows up in the Sites tab, so a buyer never has to read a legal page.
- Data validation dropdowns for License Type and Platform, so the Finder can filter cleanly.
- Checkboxes for Attribution Required and Commercial Use OK. These are the two questions people actually have.
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FILTER with SORT on the Finder tab, for example
=SORT(FILTER(Sites!A:J, ISNUMBER(SEARCH(B1, Sites!C:C)), Sites!F:F=TRUE), 7, FALSE), which shows commercial-friendly sites tagged with the chosen use case, best search first. - Conditional formatting on Last Checked, so you know which rows to re-verify before shipping an update.
- Publish to web for a free, read-only preview of the Sites tab that doubles as marketing.
Who pays for it, and how to sell it
The buyer is a content creator, a small business owner doing their own marketing, a freelance designer, or a social media manager. They pay for the time saved and for the license confidence. Nobody wants to find out after publishing that the photo needed attribution.
A one-time template price fits. The sites change slowly enough that a subscription is a harder sell, though a yearly update is reasonable if you keep the case studies growing. Affiliate links on the paid tools add a second stream without changing the price.
Sell it on Gumroad, or through OnlySheets if you want every buyer automatically shared on the live Google Sheet so your updates reach them without a re-download.
First 10 customers: post a "where I found this photo" thread once a week, showing a good image and the source, with the license note. Creators and marketers save that kind of thing. After a few weeks, point to the sheet. The people who saved your threads are your first ten.
Related ideas from the list
- Stock Video and Photo Database, the same directory idea extended to video and paid sources.
- Create a Curated Directory, the general version of this mechanic, useful for any niche.
- Swipe File of Design Inspiration, which serves the same designer and marketer buyer with visual references.
Want the other 99? This is one idea from my list of 100 business ideas you can build in Google Sheets. Get all 100 business ideas as a free Google Sheet.
And if you want to learn how to package and sell spreadsheets, my course Selling Spreadsheets walks through exactly that.
