Find Photos for your Blog in 6 Easy Steps

A point of visual interest adds a lot to a blog post. Your words are powerful on their own, but couple them with relevant images and it will be more likely to grab readers and prompt them to share it via their own social networks. If you’re not sure where to start to find images to use on your blog, Flickr is an awesome solution. There are thousands of photographs licensed for creative use by others which means you can use them in your blog posts, usually just as long as you attribute the artist.

In six really easy steps, I can assist you in finding high quality, relevant photos for your blog using Flickr and Creative Commons licensing.

Step 1: Sign up for a Free Flickr Account

An account on Flickr is completely free and having one will make it a lot easier to find great photographs and build a contact list of photographers to search through first. Go ahead and set one up now, or log into Flickr and then you can follow along with this example to see for yourself how easy this process is.

Step 2: Pick a Subject to Search

As an example, let’s say you’re having steamed crab for dinner and have a great story to tell about it. A photograph would really help to bring the scene to life and give your readers something to connect to visually. Maybe you’re not a photographer or you don’t share personal photographs on your site or maybe you just didn’t get a chance to take a picture of the crabs before they were inhaled. Whatever your reason, if you don’t have an image for your blog’s article, it’s highly recommended that you find one somewhere and add it.

Step 3: Search for the Subject on Flickr

At the top right of every page on Flickr, there’s a search bar. To start your search, just enter “steamed crabs” into the search box, then click the drop-down arrow and select to search from “Everyone’s Uploads”.

As you can see, the drop-down contains a lot of options. If you want to feature your contacts or friends before just any Joe Blow on Flickr, it’s really easy to do that. For my Friday Finds, for example, I search through my contacts first to invite their photographs to join the group before I search through all photos on Flickr.

Searching “Everyone’s Uploads” for “steamed crabs” is not quite refined enough yet. The results are relevant, however they are not necessarily licensed for use with attribution. To filter the results, just click on “Advanced Search” under the bar at the top of the page.

When the advanced search page comes up, scroll all the way to the bottom and look for the Creative Commons logo and search options.

Step 4: Choose a Creative Commons License

Creative Commons is a way for you to mark your work to be shared in a number of different ways, or as all rights reserved. This clearly indicates to others whether or not they’re free to share, distribute, alter or remix your work or whether they’re free to do none of these things.

It should be noted that Creative Commons is not a legal document and I’m not sure whether or not it would stand up in court. The individuals selecting and displaying a specific license are indicating through good faith alone that you are allowed to use their work. This may deter you from using this method, but I’ll risk it that people understand what they’re indicating. The default license set on Flickr is All Rights Reserved, so anyone who has an Attribution license must have set it as such.

There are four conditions of the license:

1. Attribution: Can others copy, share, distribute or perform your work with proper credit?
2. Share Alike: Can others share derivative works under the same license?
3. Non-Commercial: Is it cool to use or alter your work for non-commercial purposes?
4. No Derivative Works: Is it okay to use your work as long as no alterations are made to it and proper credit is given?

If you’re interested in licensing your work and need some help choosing the license, check out the License Your Work survey to find one tailored to your desires.

For your search of steamed crabs, you want to select the option to only search Creative Commons licensed content. To be safe, since I have ads and affiliate links on my site, I also select find content to use commercially. If you want to do more than just display that photo on your site – if you want to alter it or remix it in any way, you’ll want to select find content to adapt, modify or build upon.

Step 5: Sort to Find Interesting Shots First

At the top of the search results page, you will see confirmation of the search criteria selected and you can sort the results by Relevance, Recent or Interesting. For a photograph to rate high “interestingness”, it takes a special formula of views, comments, favorites, tags, groups, sets and galleries. There are plenty of theories out there on how it works, but I don’t think anyone but Flickr is really sure.

This step is certainly optional. I’ve found with some broader searches, the most exceptional photos have a high interestingness. That’s not always the case though, so you might want to look through all the sorts.

Step 6: Grab the HTML

Most Flickr users have their preferences set up to share their photos with other Flickr members. This means that a button on top of the photo called “Share This” will be available. When you click on it, there will be a number of options to allow you to share the photo with others. To put the photo on your blog, you want to select the “Get the HTML/BBCode” section. From there, you can select the resolution you’d like and the HTML code will appear for you to copy and paste into your own entry. I also add a note under the photo linking to the photostream of the owner.

If the artist does not have “Share This” available, it will be grayed out. You could contact them, explain your intent to use the photograph and see if they’ll make it available to share. Flickr doesn’t charge more for using their bandwidth in this manner, so the artist has little to lose, especially if they’ve already licensed their photos. You could also download the photo under the Actions > View all sizes menu, then upload to your own server. I find that to be too much work though. I’m a lazy blogger.

What Do You Think?

Flickr has a plethora of photographs at your fingertips to easily insert in your blog posts. Are you using Flickr or another site to find photographs and images for your blog? (Flickr does have illustrations and screenshots as well. They are marked as such and can be searched for in the Advanced Search preferences.) If you’re a photographer, do you license your images to be used by others under any Attribution license?