"A picture paints a thousand words" says the cliche. It's certainly true that a picture can lift an all-text blog post, making it more appealing to your readers. But where do you find the pictures?

Micro-stock websites

Micro-stock sites typically sell smaller, lower-resolution images suitable for use on the internet for very low prices, though you may have to reconcile yourself to seeing the same image on other people's sites too.

photo credit: ssh

The likes of Crestock, Big Stock Photo, Dreamstime and istockphoto are a quick and easy way to find images to fit many subjects. For a dollar or two, you can buy professionally-shot high-quality pictures that are ready to drop straight into your posts.

The problem, of course, is that while a couple of dollars for a photograph isn't so bad as a one-off, if you're buying a picture or two for every blog post, it soon mounts up. Plus to get the best deals on most stock sites, you have to buy a large number of credits at one go: you might not want your hard-earned cash tied up in photograph futures. Fortunately, there are plenty of places to get free stock photography.

Where not to find free pictures: Google Image Search, Yahoo Images...

Don't be tempted to think that just because it's on the internet, it's free to re-use, or that people won't notice, or that if they do notice, there's nothing they can do about it. A couple of web designers of my acquaintance have had very hefty bills recently for unauthorised use of agency photographs, and on the flip-side, as someone who had an entire site of more than 600 images stolen wholesale and republished under someone else's © tag, I promise you there are things that can be done about it, and really, why be such a jerk?

So here are just some of the places that you can find great pictures to use legally.

Flickr

What could be easier: a great big site full of millions of photos, many of which are free to use. Photographers on Flickr can license their images for reuse (or not); to find those that are available for republication, use advanced search:

Check "Only search within Creative Commons-licensed content" for images that you can publish on your own site: if you're running a commercial site or want to find images to use in your own art works, you'll need to use the additional filters too.

There are a number of plugins to allow WordPress and Flickr to interact, so that you can pull images from Flickr straight into WP's "add post" form. My favourite is PhotoDropper, largely because it has the option to sort results by "most interesting", so the first photos it shows you are normally the best (tip: increase the number of photos per page from the default 5 to 50 or so). PhotoDropper has the option to restrict results to photos available for commercial use, and will automatically label photos with attribution and a link to the photographer's Flickr page.

Alternatively, Flickr Photo Album has many useful features if you want mainly to use your own Flickr stream in WordPress.

photo credit: Pink Sherbet Photography

Creative Commons

Creative Commons is a way to license your work to allow other people to reuse it without specifically having to ask permission. You might say that other people can use your photographs, so long as they don't alter them, or your music, so long as they link back to you, or your words, so long as they've still got your name on. There are a variety of licenses according to how much freedom you want to give other people.

Creative Commons search allows you to search CC-licensed material to use in your own works. It's a bit clunky right now, and seems to largely rely (for images) on Google, Yahoo and Flickr - but it might just turn up something you can't find elsewhere.

Wikimedia Commons

Wikimedia Commons has more than 4 million images which have been licensed by their owners to be freely reused without individual permission. Attribution for the author and Wikimedia is probably required, but the terms for each image's licence are stated individually. Wikimedia can be a great source for images that just can't be found anywhere else: my picture of Mary Somerville for Ada Lovelace Day came from Wikimedia.

Free stock photography sites

There are dozens, if not hundreds of these, sometimes as a front door into paid-for media and sometimes just free. Here are just a few of the ones I've spotted: where I've included notes about terms, these are to the best of my knowledge correct at time of writing, but may change: please, please check before you take any pictures.

In many cases, even if an image is free for commercial use, it may not be free to resell or redistribute: so for example, a picture might be used on a company website or brochure, but not on t-shirts to be resold, or in website themes or another picture gallery. Again, read the terms before use.

• stock.xchng: simply, the best. 350,000 free stock pictures, free for commercial use (some photographers have additional terms, e.g. you have to notify them of use). Always worth checking this one before you pay for something!
• Amazing Textures: wood, brick, metal and so on: useful for backgrounds. Free for NC use; $20 subscription for commerical.
• ImageAfter: free for commercial use. Thumbnails are painfully small though.
• FreeFoto: more than 125,000 pictures, nicely organised. Free for commercial use with link back to site.
• Free Digital Photos.net: free for commercial use, option to buy hi-res version for print use. Small collection but good quality and particularly nice food section.
• Free-Photographs.net: free for NC use with attribution. Some good planes, trains and motorbikes.
• FreePhotos.com: free for commercial use with attribution and link back. Nice architecture section.
• FreeStockPhotos.com: free for commercial use with attribution. Particularly good Egypt, Israel and Near East sections.
• From Old Books: scanned images from old books. Some public domain, some copyright, some free for NC use. Lovely, lovely site.
• Morgue File: free for commercial use, to remix, without attribution. Great source for images for redistributed website themes, for example.
• NASA: free to use with attribution (how cool is that!)
• National Oceanic & Atmospheric Adminstration (NOAA): free to use with attribution. Weather, coastlines, animals and (my favourite) treasures of the library.
• Photocase: download credits received in exchange for uploaded pictures, or can be purchased. Some quirky and unusual shots here.
• Pixel Perfect Digital: free for personal and commercial use. Large collection of textures.
• Search 4 Dinosaurs: pretty specialist, but great fun. Contact individual artists for permission to use images (they've always just said "yes" to my NC requests).
• Stockvault: free for NC use only, more than 13,000 photos.
• Woophy: pictures of "our world" (cityscapes, landmarks, geography) organised by clickable world map. Low-res images for NC use only.
• Visipix: "the biggest art museum in the world". Free with link back to author and Visipix. Has fine art as well as photos, but the ads get to be very intrusive.

And once you've got the perfect photo

if you need help adding images to your posts, check out Adding pictures to your blog posts.

Tags: free, images, photographs, photos, stock photography

Posted by Sue on May 4, 2009 in Blogging.