Getty Images is pretty much the top destination for royalty-free stock photos. Each photo on the website has an associated price tag which you need to pay for if you want to use it for commercial purposes. But for making mockup designs and drafts for website designs and/or layouts for print media, stock images are simply more attractive as placeholder images. The most professional way to show off these mockups or drafts to your clients is to use stock images without any watermarks.
Currently, all stock photos in Getty Images are watermarked suggesting that you really need to buy it. A few years back, creating a Getty Images account and logging in would let you see a non-watermarked but low resolution version. This no longer applies at present.
The good news is that you don’t even have to be a registered member of Getty Images to see low resolution version of the stock photo without the watermark and it isn’t the size of a thumbnail.
All you have to do is search for the image you like and click the one you want. See the screenshot below.
What you want to do is click the “</>” button as indicated by the arrow. This will bring up the “Embed this image” dialog where you can paste a special HTML code to embed the stock photo on a webpage. But if you look at the image preview, you will see that the watermark is only located on the bottom which means that you can crop it out. Choose the largest Use your favorite screen capture tool (or press the “Command+Shift+4” hotkey if you are using OS X) and capture the image without the watermark on the bottom.
Once you have the image, you can now use it to your liking although it is best that you don’t use it for commercial purposes. The image is small but for layouting, you can still size it up a bit without too much noticeable distortion.