Five sources of free photographs for your blog

Capturing your read­ers’ atten­tion with art is a well-​​known (it’s #10 on Guy Kawasaki’s list) and effec­tive strat­egy for cre­at­ing bet­ter blog. (Besides, it’s fun.) There are plenty of stock photo sites out there that offer art at rea­son­able prices (Fotalia and iStock­photo are two exam­ples), but for many blog­gers (espe­cially those not out for com­mer­cial gain) there’s no sense in spend­ing money to get good pho­tographs on your blog.

Note that if you run a com­mer­cial, for-​​profit blog — a blog con­nected to your for-​​profit com­pany, or a blog with some­thing more than a few AdSense ads to pay for host­ing, you need to pay even closer atten­tion to the licens­ing terms. Many Creative Commons pho­tographs, for exam­ple, do not allow “com­mer­cial use.” In this case, if you want to use them any­way, you should con­tact the pho­tog­ra­pher or artist first.

Here, then, are five sources of free, high-​​quality pho­tographs for your blog:

Flickr

Flickr is by far my pre­ferred source. Photographs here are very often high-​​quality and cer­tainly unique, which sets them apart from every­one else’s “stock” pho­tographs, I think, and adds a cer­tain indi­vid­ual touch. To eas­ily find pho­tographs on Flickr that you can use, you need to search either for public-​​domain images or for those licensed via Creative Commons (you may be able to use other images, but you will need explicit per­mis­sion from the pho­tog­ra­pher first).

Creative Commons on Flickr

1. Look to the bot­tom of Flickr’s main page, and click on the link labeled “Creative Commons” (not “The Commons” — I’ll dis­cuss that next), to the right of the “Explore” label.
2. Then use Flickr’s search func­tion at the top of the page, on the right side.
3. Scroll down, and select “Only search within Creative Commons-​​licensed con­tent.” (If you run a com­mer­cial blog, you will need to also check “Find con­tent to use com­mer­cially,” unless you plan to first receive explicit per­mis­sion from the pho­tog­ra­pher first before using the image.)
4. After your search results come up, click on the image you want to use. Now, you will likely want to use an image size appro­pri­ate to your blog, so click on “all sizes.”
5. Then select the size you want to use (I find the “small” size the most use­ful in a blog post).
6. Depending on your blog soft­ware, you may want to either down­load this image to your com­puter and them put it into your blog, or sim­ply leave the image on Flickr’s site and include it in your blog via its URL. Either way, right click­ing should give you the infor­ma­tion you want in your browser.
7. Finally, after you put the image in your post, don’t for­get that you need to pro­vide attri­bu­tion. To get the full license infor­ma­tion, look to the bottom-​​right of your screen on the main Flickr page for the image, and click on “Some right reserved.“There are numer­ous appro­pri­ate ways to pro­vide proper attri­bu­tion, but I pre­fer to use the “title” attribute of the “img” tag to include an infor­ma­tional line like this: “Toby using a com­puter. For real.” by Flickr user Kevin Steele, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-​​Noncommercial 2.0 license. (For an exam­ple, hover your mouse cur­sor over the full image of the cat on a lap­top.) For more infor­ma­tion on hot to prop­erly attribute Flickr images, see how to write attri­bu­tions for the Creative Commons licensed images you use on your blog.

The Commons on Flickr

Somewhat con­fus­ingly, Flickr also pro­vides access to a the archives of a num­ber of insti­tu­tions and gov­ern­ment insti­tu­tions via “The Commons.” These are gen­er­ally public-​​domain images, usable by any­one for any pur­pose, com­mer­cial or not. Most of these images are older, and most are black and white — you won’t find many (any?) shots of lap­tops or cell phones here!

1. To find these pho­tographs, look to the bot­tom of the ini­tial Flickr page again, but click on “The Commons” this time.
2. Next, search.
3. Then pro­ceed as above, select­ing the cor­rect size and insert­ing it into your blog post.
4. While these are gen­er­ally public-​​domain images, you may wish to con­firm their copy­right sta­tus. Scroll down the page, and look to the bottom-​​right of the page.
5. If there are “no known copy­right restric­tions,” then you are not required to pro­vide attri­bu­tion — but it is still good practice!

The Creative Commons “Meta-​​Search” Engine

Creative Commons offers “con­ve­nient access to search ser­vices pro­vided by other inde­pen­dent orga­ni­za­tions.” The point is to help you find Creative Commons-​​licensed works that you can use.

1. Visit search​.cre​ativecom​mons​.org, and enter your search terms in the box at the top of the screen. (If you run a com­mer­cial site, make sure you leave “use for com­mer­cial pur­poses” checked.)
2. Results will show up imme­di­ately, but you may wish to try the var­i­ous ser­vices Creative Commons sup­ports. Just click on the ser­vice at the top, and results from that ser­vice will appear below.
3. Your image results will not be from a uni­form ser­vice. You may need to look care­fully to make sure of the Creative Commons license the pho­tog­ra­pher is using — you shouldn’t trust the search engine to be correct.
4. Unlike images from Flickr, you may need to host the images on your site instead of host­ing them else­where. (Flickr can han­dle the load and allows you to host linked images on Flickr; oth­ers may not be able to.)
5. You should use a sim­i­lar style of attri­bu­tion for these images that you might use for Flickr images, includ­ing the image title, the creator’s name, the license, and a link to the image’s page. (See my post­ing about how to write attri­bu­tions for the Creative Commons licensed images you use on your blog.)

Stock.XCHNG

Stock.XCHNG, owned by Getty Images, pro­vides free images, along with a selec­tion of pay-​​to-​​use pho­tos from iStock­photo.

1. Use the search box on the left of the page to search for images.
2. Check the usage infor­ma­tion on the right side of the page.
3. And also check the avail­abil­ity details below the image to see if the pho­tog­ra­pher has addi­tional require­ments for use, such as notification.
4. “Standard restric­tions” refers to the stan­dard license terms from the Stock.XCHNG Web site:
   

   We hereby grant to You a non-​​exclusive, non-​​transferable license to use the Image on the terms and con­di­tions explained in this Agreement and on the Image pre­view page FREE OF CHARGE.

   (Read the whole license for full details.) As noted in the license, you may need to fol­low the terms listed under “avail­abil­ity” (see #3 above).

5. Finally, down­load and use the image on your blog!

Zemanta

Zemanta is a Web-​​based tool for blog­gers to add images and links to your blog posts. You can install a Zemanta plu­gin or exten­sion, or sim­ply use the Zemanta book­marklet with­out installing anything.

Zemanta adds a small box to the right side of the screen that looks like this:

Click on an image to insert it into your post, or drag images over to place them where you wish. Simple. (You can be more spe­cific about your search by click on “refine.”)

Zemanta also takes care of insert­ing the proper attri­bu­tion for your use of images. By default, they are hosted else­where (which over time can be an issue, since I have had a few dis­ap­pear over time).

“Freebie Images” by cre​stock​.com

For now, this option is lim­ited to WordPress only, because it relies on a WordPress plu­gin to func­tion. (The main Crestock site sells images for rea­son­able rates, use­ful if you need high-​​resolution images.) Images pro­vided via the plu­gin, unlike the site, are free and licensed under Creative Commons. You can even use them on com­mer­cial sites with­out worry. The main lim­i­ta­tion is that the images are sized for use on blogs (and that the plu­gin is only avail­able for WordPress).

1. Install the plu­gin (for help, see Managing Plugins in the WordPress Codex).
2. When cre­at­ing a new blog post, you should see a “Freebie Images” box on the right side of the edit­ing screen. Use the search box to find appro­pri­ate images, which are then dis­played in the lower por­tion of the box.
3. Then sim­ply drag the image you want into your post. The plu­gin takes care of adding an image cap­tion to han­dle attribution.

The plu­gin also has advanced searches avail­able, if you need to spec­ify a par­tic­u­lar image ori­en­ta­tion, etc. (For more details, see the Crestock site about the plu­gin.)