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Find free pictures for your blog and avoid letters from lawyers

30 June 2010 | social-media | 0 Comment Find free pictures for your blog and avoid letters from lawyers

Avoiding stealing content

Have you ever gone to a real estate blog or website and seen the same old tired picture of a Realtor and a buyer in front of a house? You know, that picture of the lady in red giving a young couple the keys to their new house where everyone looks happy?

Yeah, us too. There’s a way to avoid being part of the trap of using repetitive images AND avoid using Google to search for images that lead you to the red shirt lady. An added benefit to not stealing pictures from Google is that lawyers won’t send you letters for your content theft. Yay!

Enough jibber jabber, here’s how:

1. Go to Flickr.com. But relax, you don’t need an account for this process. Tell Flickr what you’re looking for. We’ll try “Austin skyline.”

2. To the right of the “search” button, click words “Advanced Search” in blue.

3. It will take you to a new page with no pictures but a ton of options. Don’t worry about all of the options you’re given, just scroll to the very bottom and where you see the words “creative commons,” select all three buttons/options that are given to you, then click the blue “search” button.

4. That will take you to a variety of pictures to choose from and because they’re “creative commons licensed” and you’ve even told it you only want images that are okay to be used commercially, you’ve found only images that are okay to use on your blog for free. No royalties, no money, and no aggressive lawyers emailing you. Hooray!

Click on the image you want and it will open in a page all on its own. Right click on the image and click “save as” and put it wherever you like on your computer. It’s now yours.

5. Although it’s not required, we recommend as a courtesy (in case the rules ever change or someone is picky) to attribute your photo use at the end of every article. In the picture above, you can see who the photographer is by name, and you see the URL at the top of your browser for that picture, so here’s how to give credit:

“CC Licensed image courtesy of Rafael Marquez via Flickr.com.”

The words “Rafael Marquez” should be a link to the specific picture. We recommend putting this credit in a smaller font or italics to separate it from the body of your article. For an example, see the credit at the bottom of this very article.

Homework

Get to know what Creative Commons are. Click here to learn what all of the symbols mean and what you can use when it comes to web content and avoid all those stinky lawyers (umm, unless YOU are a lawyer in which case we mean the OTHER stinky lawyers)!

CC Licensed image of polaroids courtesy of Sylvio Tanaka via Flickr.com.

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