Aug
9
Photography: young photographer by muha…
This is a guest post by Skellie. She writes tips and tutorials on creating better content at her blog, Skelliewag.org.
A carefully selected image can amplify the pulling power of a good post. In a page otherwise filled with text an interesting image draws the attention of the reader and can help re-enforce your words. That’s all well and good, you might say, but where can I find an image to do the job?
For many bloggers Google Images can be a tempting choice but it’s one I strongly advise against. It’s often difficult to work out whether a specific image is copyrighted or requires royalties for its use. You don’t want your site to get popular only to have someone discover you’re using a copyrighted image and slap you with a bill for hundreds (or thousands) of dollars in royalties. Unfortunately, I’ve heard of this occurring on several occasions.
Other alternatives bloggers sometimes use are royalty-free stock photo services (such as iStockPhoto). While it’s good to know that you’re not taking a legal risk with these images, the unfortunate truth is that most stock images are bland and contrived. People are so used to seeing stock images that your readers’ eyes will slide right over them. After all, there are only so many tropical beaches and pensive business-women behind laptops we can encounter before the effect begins to wear off.
Obviously, stock images are not what we’re looking for.
Flickr to the rescue
Flickr is an image hosting service favored by people who take photography seriously. It’s home to thousands of remarkable photos captured by both amateurs and professionals.
Best of all there are thousands of searchable Flickr images you can use to accompany your postings. It’s simply a matter of finding them.
You can do so quickly and easily via the Flickr Advanced Search form. Here you can select several options which will ensure you’re legally in the clear when using images from Flickr.
Select ‘Only search within Creative Commons-licensed photos’
This will ensure that you can republish images on your own site without risk of violating anyone’s copyright and paying for it later — as long as you are not making any money from your site. However, most bloggers are making a little bit of advertising income and will also need to…
Select ‘Find content to use commercially’
This means the search results will only turn up images you can use on a site which displays advertising.
If you want to change the images in any way…
By resizing them, cropping them, placing text on them, and so on, you’ll also need to select ‘Find content to modify, adapt, or build upon’. This ensures your search doesn’t return any images which can’t be altered.
Start searching
Once you’ve selected the options you need it’s time to start searching. The default setting is to search within the titles of images and I find this works well for me, but you can also search the tags authors have applied to their images.
Sometimes you’ll have an idea of the kind of image you want and can describe it via keywords in the search form. Other times it can be interesting to search abstract keywords and see what Flickr comes up with. You can also search for images of a specific color if you want to make sure the image matches your color scheme.
Most of the images are quite large and will need to be resized so as not to over-shadow your content. You can use a free image editor such as GIMP to do this (if you don’t already have one you like to use).
Using the images you find
When you click on a search result to view it full size and decide you’d like to use the image, be sure to click on the ’some rights reserved’ link on the side bar. This will take you to the specific Creative Commons license for that image. Check that the way you intend to use the image complies with the license. If it does, you’re ready to go.
Now all that’s left to do is insert the image into your post and…
Attribute
Every image you find on Flickr requires attribution. Luckily, this is easy to do. The format should be #title by #author, with the title linking to the image’s individual Flickr page, and the author linking to the author’s Flickr profile. Put the attribution as close to the image as possible.
You can see attribution in practice at my own blog. As you can see, nearly all my posts use photography from Flickr and I couldn’t be happier with the effect. Not only are you creating posts which are a joy to look at, you’re also showcasing some very talented photographers who’ve been kind enough to share their work with others.
Excellent post… thanks Skellie. I hardly ever add images to my posts so this is something that I really need to work on.
Well all I every used was Google Images for this purpose!
Thanks Skellie. I’ve used images here and there but haven’t focused on it, especially after I started using adsense within the content on my posts. I’m glad I never used Google images, though!
I really like your use of images on your site, they look great.
I never used the Flickr advanced search form, hmm have to try that.
I host all my pics there, and am glad to let others use my pics, just hopefully want the credit.
For my blogs, if I don’t have any relevant pics, I will go to YotoPhoto. I believe they have pics from around the web, including Flickr that are free to use.
That is one great pic … looks like might daughter when she is playing with the digital camera!
Darin
Thanks for the advice! I’ve been going to istockphoto and a few other free ones, didn’t know how to use flickr at all, so this is a great help.
I didn’t know Flickr had an advance search that allowed you to search for images like that. I think this could be a great source of photos. Thanks.
An interesting article - personally, I prefer to use stock.xchng (www.sxc.hu), although I have been reminded not to forget about Flickr thanks to this post!
- Martin Reed
I usually use stock exchange too and Flikr occasionally.
Well, I usually use Google image and found bad
Sometimes istockphoto, but now I’m using flickR. Thanks, I found FLickR are great!
I have used istockphoto in the past and I was satisfied with the quality and price
In the past I was mostly relying on my taking pictures myself and my 10-year collection of photos but with more and more posting online i’m having hard time to find good prictures…
Good list of other potential options for me, i’m definitely will be going through them.
Thank!
—
Sleeping Dude
Do you know how to wake up early, consistently?
i brought a few pics from istock before….they have some quality pics and a huge amount of subjects too
yup they are the best paid source in my opinion
Thanks for the valuable information. I have wanted to add more pictures to my post, but was afraid on the troubles that might result from such addition.
I have added 2 pictures to my latest post, but still need to format a decent enough attribution line. I will get on that tonight.
Thanks again.
I wanted to use pictures on my blog but was concerned about the possible legal ramifications.. thanks!
[...] site I admire and one that’s also a lot bigger than Skelliewag. I wrote a post called ‘A Source of Amazing Images for Your Blog‘ which discusses ways to find and legally use great images from Flickr. It was great to work [...]
True. Flickr has been a great source of images for my blogs. its easy and no risk.
I agree that Flickr is an amazing resource for people that are looking for cool images. That’s exactly where I picked up the background image that’s currently being used on Earsucker. Granted, I morphed the image so much that you can’t tell what it really started as originally.
It is definitely a great resource for those not wanting to goof around with images from google.
I also find http://www.sxc.hu a godsend for this sort of thing
[...] I’ve written an answer to this question at PureBlogging. [...]
Thanks for this post. I never thought about using Flickr before, but it is clearly the most obvious solution….
[...] A Source of Amazing Images For Your Blog @ PureBlogging [...]
If you’re going to use Creative Commons images from Flickr it might be worth checking out the new-ish plugin Photodropper, which pulls in all the links and credits as well as displaying the image all with minimal fuss. Personally, I’d prefer to host any images I use on my own server rather than hotlink flickr itself, and I’ve asked the Photodropper people whether there’s an easy hack that would allow people to do that.
db
Nice additional information David, thanks for the heads up.
Thank you, great post, i haven’t used flicker much before for images but it sounds brilliant and feels nice to promote people that are willing to share their pics.
Thanks for all the sources to get photos for our blog. Often finding the perfect photo can make the piece.
There are a lot of free stock photos which you always can use and I know they are pretty good.
This is all well and good, however, what pictures should you use if you have a movie blog? None of those sites mentioned will suffice.
Getting great photos make the posts and been playing with Flickr and need to check some of the other resources out.
Nice additional information…., thanks for the heads up.
A picture is worth a thousand words and maybe even more than that sometimes… Finding the right image can be very hard sometimes, but try to find some art blogs or art sites that offer such images and your troubles could be over.
I personally use sxc.hu - it has a bunch of professional stock images for free (with an account).
Great job!!! Images is always a weak point in my blog
Flicker is my best companion for my site and I can’t agree more with you post. It’s easy to find pictures that are free to use as long as you have proper citation for them! Thanks for spreading the word!
You are right the apt image may add popularity to your blog. It always captures one’s attention so it is very important to choose the right one. To find the appropriate image requires much time and efforts but it is worth doing so.
I use everystockphoto_com for topic images and cgtextures_com for building my own pictures in photoshop. Great sites.
My favorite sites are Deviantart, Flicker and StockVault
im using flickr, although now theres much more option …
Flickr is definitely an awesome source of images.so is photobucket and shareapic - shareapic is even able to generate income for us .
I use Flickr a lot to get some nice attractive photos for my posts.
As a neophyte blogger, this was one of the most informative articles I have found. Thanks mucho.
Great post. We have an online store and don’t have pictures for all our products… yet we can’t go around ‘borrowing’ other people’s images and it’s tough to find good gourmet pictures. Thanks again.
[...] site I admire and one that’s also a lot bigger than Skelliewag. I wrote a post called ‘A Source of Amazing Images for Your Blog‘ which discusses ways to find and legally use great images from Flickr. It was great to work [...]