At some point on your blog, you’re going to want to include images. Unless you only ever use screenshots, you’ll need to either create these images yourself and or you’ll need to find ones that you can legally use.
If you only take one thing away from this post, make it this: never search on Google for an image and use what you find without checking whether it’s OK to. Many images are copyrighted to their creator, and you can’t (legally) republish them on your blog.
A Quick Introduction to Copyright and Creative Commons
Under most countries’ laws, content that you create (e.g. text, audio, images, or video) is automatically “copyright” to you.
This means no-one can republish it on their own website with your permission.
Some content creators choose to license their work under “Creative Commons”. This means you’re allowed to republish their image (or blog post, video, etc) and but there will sometimes be certain restrictions.
If you make money from your blog (or hope to do so in future) then you should look for images licensed under “Creative Commons for Commercial Use”.
You can find out more about different Creative Commons licenses here.
Where to Get Free Images
Image from Flickr by AGoK.
My favourite source of free images is Flickr. Use the Advanced Search and check the boxes:
- Only search within Creative Commons-licensed content
- Find content to use commercially
When you use an image from Flickr, you should always acknowledge the author with a line like this:
Image by AUTHOR NAME
It’s nice to link their name either to the image itself or to their main page on Flickr, as in the example above.
(This isn’t the only format you can use for your attributions, and you’ll see different bloggers doing different things. What’s important is that you always acknowledge the image’s creator by name.)
Another good source of photos is stock.xchng. This site has a lot of royalty free images that you can use, normally without attribution. (Some bloggers prefer to attribute all images as a courtesy to the creators.)
The images on stock.xchng tend to have a more “stock” feel than those on Flickr, which may or may not be an advantage, depending on what sorts of images you want to use.
Choosing a Great Image
Different bloggers will have different opinions on what makes for a great image. If your blog is for a quite traditional, formal business, then standard stock photos might work well. If you’re writing a more creative blog, you may want brightly coloured images … and so on.
Here are some general tips, though:
- Allow enough time to find an image. It can take a bit of searching to find something that suits your post.
- Often, you’ll want an image that illustrates a concept (e.g. “motivation” or “focus”). Brainstorm some ideas for images that might work well and it’s easier to search for something concrete (perhaps a magnifying glass for “focus”) than for an abstract idea.
- Think about colour. You may want to use very bright, colourful images, or you may choose ones that match with your blog’s colour scheme. Alternatively, perhaps black and white images will work well for you.
- Consider picking a consistent theme. Maybe you’ll always use photos of cats, or children. Perhaps you’ll go for illustrations rather than photos.
What About Logos, Product Images, etc?
Most bloggers will agree it’s OK to republish a company or blog’s logo without asking them for express permission. The same goes for book and ebook covers. If you’re uncertain or unsure, it’s worth asking.
If you’re an affiliate for a product, you may well have access to advertising banners and product images that you can use and it’s fine to use these in your posts.
Do you use images on your blog? What’s your favourite source and and what tips do you have for picking great images? Let us know in the comments.
About Mark
Mark is an digital entrepreneur from New York City who recently acquired DBT. He started his ventures buying growing then selling several businesses and content blogs on Flippa. A perfect night for him constitutes pizza, wine, slow jazz and WordPress! He's an SEO expert and a growth strategist. When he's not working on his businesses he enjoys sharing his learned lessons with the DBT community.
Great post, I use a plugin called “Insights” that allows you to quickly search and insert images (from flickr) into your blog post
Thank you. I have saved this post for future use. Very informative.
Hi Ali. I always come to this website to learn something unique and yup all of the posts teach me something great. I always use flicker for blog post as it is the best source I like. Thanks
Wonderful post. I’ve actually been using the WordPress plugin, “Photodropper,” but it has recently stopped showing free(flickr) images in favor of their premium quality. I honestly don’t want to pay.
Thanks for this great article. Sometimes it’s confusing which photos we can use, especially if it’s for commercial use. I’d also like to thank Ryan above for the referral to freedigitalphotos.net. A new resource that I’m bound to love!!!
Great post, Ali! One site I commonly use to find images for free use (CC) is PhotoPin.com. They show sponsored images on top but below that shows usually a lot of free images as well. They don’t have a lot of clipart-based images but anymore, experts say that using ‘real item’ images (espcially with people on them) gives you better results in catching the attention of your readers.
Good article on images! Newbies may think the images on Google images are all okay to use, so it’s good to remind everyone to check out where the image is coming from and what sort of restrictions/costs are attached.
I’d like to address your last section. Logos and product images are two different issues.
Awesome post, Ali!
I personally really like Flickr for photos since most are in very good quality.
Although good, they are also good in Google and Facebook photos also find excellent photos. If we fanpage some pictures we can always choose one from there….awesome…thanksss…!!!
I usually use Photodune, Shutterstock, depositphotos to buy copyrighted image for my project. This help to get license for my images…
Hi Ali,
I really love this post. I always search on Google for an image and use for my blog. The information in this article is really unique and useful for me. Thanks for sharing this post. Hope to read more interesting information from you. Great job!
Cool! I’ve always used the free stock photo sites in finding images for my posts and even Google image search sometimes. I didn’t realize Flickr is also a good source so I’ll definitely try that as well.
Hello,
Hi Ali,
If you google a pic and it does not have a watermark can you use it?