Image by qthomasbower via Flickr

A challenge I have encountered in blogging with students is having them find, use and credit images properly. It is far too tempting to grab something from a Google Image Search and stick it into a blog post, but more often than not, this leads to violating copyright protection.

Finding Usable Images:

• Zemanta. Zemanta is a great tool for bloggers, and it is absolutely free. I highly recommend giving it a try (there is even an online demo version if you want to test it out prior to downloading it). Zemanta opens in your dashboard and suggests images, related articles, in-text links and tags as you type your post content. All suggested images are available under a Creative Commons license and can be inserted into your post with a single click. It automatically inserts a link and photo credit along with the image.
• Google Advanced Image Search. Enter your keywords and specify any special attributes. Under usage rights, select the option “Only images labeled for reuse.”
• Flickr Advanced Search. Enter your keywords. Under Creative Commons, select the option “Only search within Creative Commons-licensed content.” Once the search results appear, you can change the sort order by clicking on the links (above the top row of thumbnails) Relevant, Recent, or Interesting. The default sort setting is Relevant, but I tend to find much better results sorting by Interesting.
• Behold. Search over one million images under the Creative Commons license on Flickr. This search returns high quality images, which can be more helpful than the Flickr Advanced Search.
• Explore Picasa Web Albums. Enter your keywords in the search box and click Search. In the left sidebar select Creative Commons to limit the search results.
• Wikimedia Commons. Enter your keywords to search the database of over 11 million free-to-use images.
• stock.xchng offers a large collection of free stock photography. When you search, the top and bottom row of images are labeled “premium results from iStockphoto.com.” These are not free, and you will definitely notice a difference in quality when comparing the free and premium images.

Using/Crediting Images:

When attributing images, you should include the title of the image, the author’s name, where you found the image, and the copyright information. Let’s use the image in this post as an example. This image came from Flickr and can be found here. The title of the image is “2500 Creative Common Images” and the author is qthomasbower. In the right sidebar under License we see that this image has a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. The image should be attributed in one of the following ways:

• “2500 Creative Common Images“, qthomasbower, Flickr, (CC) BY-SA
• “2500 Creative Common Images“, qthomasbower, Flickr 
• Featured (cc) image by qthomasbower via Flickr, “2500 Creative Common Images”

You can download Creative Commons logos from the Creative Commons website.

	http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0
	http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0
	http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0
	http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0
	http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0
	http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0

Related articles

• Official Google Blog: Find Creative Commons images with Image Search (googleblog.blogspot.com)
• A Complete Guide to Finding and Using Incredible Flickr Images (skelliewag.org)
• Creative Commons for Bloggers- Explained (dailyblogtips.com)
• Finding and Using Public Domain Photographs (publicdomainsherpa.com)
• About the License (creativecommons.org)