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Spicing up your blog with amazing pictures

Its the color that convinces them

A blog isn’t just about text. A simple image can convey a feeling of depth to an article that it wouldn’t otherwise have. It is good for making your readers feel at home and comfortable while visiting your blog.

If you are writing a personal blog, images are simply life events as you observed them with your own camera. But if you are, like me, writing about pure ideas and concepts things get a little trickier.

Yellow Yellow Yellow by vj_flicks

Google Images

This might be the first place you look, after all, its right there in the search window, but it would also be the worst place to look. Why?

  • Firstly, the quality of the search results is pretty dreadful. The results are any random images found by Google as it scoured the internet.
  • Secondly, none or few of the pictures will have any © copyright information next to them. This is a big problem as you cannot use images where you do not have obtained permission for use.

Stock Images

In a galaxy far, far away, about 6-7 years ago, a single picture for commercial use would set you back hundreds of dollars. It still does sometimes, if you need a print quality images for hundreds of thousands of prints, by a world famous photographer. The arrival of the digital camera changed all that.

Many internet based “royalty free” agencies now provide pictures from as low as US$ 1. Much simplified, royalty free usually means that you can use the picture for a single project and that you do not have to pay royalties for each copy (every time someone watches your web page).

  • You can find literally anything, but the quality might be a little too “general” for your taste. Stock photography is like that. It has a whole range of “no go” areas. You won’t find pictures with company logo’s, any branding, people’s faces (possible, but only with a model release)
  • There is no confusion about the rights of the picture. If you buy the right license, you can use it.
  • As this costs money, even at US$ 1, this should be your option if you have an idea for a picture and cannot find it anywhere else.

Some stock photography sites are:


Flickr

Flickr is a place where people share their pictures. Many of them are enthusiastic and exited by the things they can capture with their cameras. It has become one of the most wonderful and interesting sites on the Internet and I can spend hours browsing the things found here.

You can use images found here, as long as you are aware of the “rules”. Images on Flickr are licensed either traditionally, or using the Creative Commons License.

Images marked as copyrighted cannot be used for your blog. It might be possible, but you would need to e-mail the author for permission first. That might take a few days — so unless the image is really essential this should not be the first choice.

Flickr offers an option in the “Advanced Search” to only search for Creative Commons Licensed images. The Create Commons License allows people to share pictures, and give you the right to use them, but with some restrictions.

A quick guide to the Create Commons license options found on Flickr:

Attribution You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your copyrighted work - and derivative works based upon it - but only if they give you credit.
This means that you can use the image for your blog, but you need to give credit (through a note below the picture, and possibly a link back to the author on Flickr).

Noncommercial You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your work - and derivative works based upon it - but for noncommercial purposes only.

This is an important distinction — if your blog is non-commercial you can use this picture, but what if you decide to add advertising later on? Then your site would no longer qualify. To be safe, Flickr allows you to ignore pictures that require the “non-commercial” license.

No Derivative Works
You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform only verbatim copies of your work, not derivative works based upon it.
You can use the picture, but only in its unaltered form. You cannot insert the image into a collage or combination, use it for a logo, cut out an object or figure.
Share Alike
You allow others to distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs your work.

If this option is set, you can only use the image for making your own interpretation (such as cutting out a character and putting it into a collage) but only if you allow sharing of your newly created image under the same license as the original.

Note

This Knol is a post I wrote originally for blogmechanics.net, now sadly defunct.

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