Finding great images for your blog

Great images help make your posts memorable and alive, and can break the monotony of too much text.  Fortunately there are a number of sources of good images.

Royalty-free stock photographs

Several companies offer vast portfolios of royalty-free photographs that you can buy very cheaply.  Royalty-free means that you pay once only for the photograph (typically a dollar or two), and thereafter you can use the photograph as many times as you like, without any further payments.  You can use the photo on your blog, on your website, in emails, on printed materials or in advertisements, etc.  You also do not have to show any attribution when you use the photograph.

The best stock photo service is iStockphoto.  They offer an enormous range of very high quality images.  When you need a good photo for a post, you can search by keywords to find just the photo you want.  (If you're laying out an advertisement, you can search as well for images with certain colours that have free space in certain quadrants, for your copy).  Photographs cost from 1 to 10 credits depending on the size you want.  You buy credits in bundles from as low as $1 a credit in a bundle for $13 (note that credits expire after a year).  iStockphoto also supplies vector images and video clips.  Subscribe to their newsletter to get their latest news and to snag the great free images they offer every week (example above) or the free video clip of the month.  Many of the images on Into iSpace and on my blog Worldsong are from iStockphoto.

A similar site, offering a range of free and "premium" (paid) photos is Stock.XCHNG.  And Mashable has a list of 30+ Background & Stock Image Sites.

One of the biggest collections of images in the world (over 100 million images), including art reproductions and historic news photography is held by Corbis, a private company owned by Bill Gates.  Corbis will also soon be making many of their images available to bloggers.

Creative Commons photos from Flickr and other sites

Flickr, if you haven't heard of it yet, is a site where you can upload your photos to share with others.  There are over 2 billion photos on Flickr, searchable by "tags" that people enter with their photos, like beach, soccer, family, Norway, etc.  Many people make their Flickr photos available to others to use under a Creative Commons license.  This means that you can use their photographs, subject to certain rules.  If their Creative Commons license specifies "Atrribution", then you must acknowledge the source of the photo in your post, usually with a link back to the original photo.  For example, here is how you would show one of my photos:


Photo: Neil Hinrichsen on Flickr

There are many other sites who offer photos for use under a Creative Commons license - see for example Mashable's list of 25+ Sources For Creative Commons Content.  Please read Understanding Creative Commons for more on using these photos correctly.

Your own photography

If you enjoy digital photography your own photographs can be a great source of images for eye-catching posts.  Consider using a collage of several photographs together for events, such as our youth group Beach Walk or our church Hobbies Day - or these pirates.

To organise and catalog all your photos, so that you can find them later, invest in a superb program called ExifPro.  (You can use it for free if you don't mind waiting for a "splash screen" at the beginning to go away after twenty seconds, otherwise it costs $20).  It lets you view all your photos as thumbnails (with a slider for dynamically resizing all the thumbnails) or full size.  Plus you can edit a Description field that is stored inside each photo - which allows you to store all your notes about the photo - when it was taken, who is in it, etc - inside the photo, instead of having a clunky filename for each photo.  And there is a search feature (called a Filter) on this field - so that you can instantly pull up all the photos with a certain person in them.  You can also use ExifPro to edit photos, resize photos, send them as emails, etc.  I couldn't live without this program!

 

More photo sites and lists of photo resources

 

Please add any other good sites that you can recommend in the comments below.

 

iSpace Links