What images can you use on your Blog – Google+, Facebook or Pinterest.
We all love images, they give life to our blog or our text, they are noticed and remembered. Images break up a big block of text and make it look attractive. People love colours and beauty, its our nature, and its also our nature to share.
There are so many great photos or pictures on the internet, being posted on Facebook, Google+ and many other blogs and websites, that we think that it must be a free for all and if someone else has shared the image then so can we, but a lot of the time we actually can’t. Or we share things hoping the previous person has done it correctly. I think we’ve all been caught out on this – its a dangerous area and there are rules.
The rules are – You can only use images that are free, you own, or that you paid for.
So first we really need to check to see if they are free. Shares on Facebook have been shared so often that sometimes this is tricky. If they are free we need to check the permissions, maybe we have to give credit or attribution information.
To give appropriate attribution information in most cases you need to
- Provide the original source URL
- A description
- The name of the creator.
How can I find photos to use on my blog
People ask this all of the time…… you can ..
1, Buy images from somewhere like http://www.istockphoto.com/ or http://www.shutterstock.com and another good one is http://uk.photos.com/
2. Search on Google image search to see if the picture you wish to use has a creative commons licence that is applicable.
I love this, its so clever – You see a picture on Facebook and you want to share it or use it on your blog but there is no link back to the original. Save the picture. Open Google images click the camera in the search bar and upload the image – press search – google will now hopefully give you all of the websites the image has been on, and if you are lucky you will find the original information and that it is okay to share it.
3. Use Public Domain Images - Public domain works, not copyrighted, no rights reserved free for personal and commercial use. I’d just suggest googling this.
4. Sign up for The creative finder - I’ve just signed up for this and it looks great you can share to many networks including Facebook tumble and pinterest with the creators permission for free! It uses embedded links so you don’t even have to type anything. I used on on this post – Its not been around for very long so it doesn’t have many images on it yet but I love it already, you should check it out.
5. Search for images that hold creative commons licenses. Make sure that you read the licence, they do vary on how you can use the image.
I’ve started to use Flickr Creative commons or I make my own images.
http://michelledh.deviantart.com/ http://art.techieminx.com/ http://michelleharris.posterous.com/
“Creative Commons is a non-profit that offers an alternative to full copyright.
Go to this link - http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/ flickr tells you on the left what all of the different licences mean, which I think is pretty clear. Then you just search through the pictures, what I have found is that the tags on the pictures aren’t very good, as people don’t bother to tag their own pictures, they just leave it as a number, so you do have to do a bit of searching.
I am not a lawyer, I am just trying to help. Yes, I’ve made mistakes too. This information is what I have collected over the years of blogging, as when I started, I didn’t realise the pitfalls and this will hopefully help others.
If you have any other good sources that you use for free images, please let us know, that would be a great help. Thanks.
