Photopin

Photo credit: Photopin

Do you use images in your blog posts? Blog posts with images get more views than ones without!

Do you find you're put off blogging because you need some images to liven up your post, but never seem to have the right one(s) to hand? 

Try Photopin !  It's a free image search tool for bloggers and creatives, that searches through Flickr using keywords - so if you need a pic of, say a giraffe, just put giraffe into the search box and off you go... easy!

Here's an interesting one I found, a couple of book-worm giraffes...

photo credit: h.koppdelaney via photopin cc

When Photopin returns the results, it is super easy to filter the images to find those with a Creative Commons License allowing commercial use - just select the 'commercial' check box (on the left). 

It's best to check the Creative Commons License for each image individually - if you open the image URL on Flickr and look to the right of it, you will find a link to the exact terms of use.

The Creative Commons license will specify any restrictions - for example for most images you aren't allowed to resell them or in some cases alter them in any way - but you can still make use of them on a blog, as long as you credit the owner of the photo with a link to their image on Flickr.

Photopin makes the credit link process very easy to do by providing both the URL to the image and cleverly some HTML code which you can insert in your blog post.  If you are not able to add HTML on your blog, you can copy the URL to the image on Flickr and put in a link as you would normally.  

On Blogger it is VERY easy to add HTML code.  Simply copy the code off Photopin and then in the post you are writing look on your toolbar (where you change the text size/make text bold etc)  and on the far left you will see 'Compose' and 'HTML'.  Click on 'HTML' and paste in the code - then click back onto 'Compose' to see what it looks like.  You can then move the credit around your post by copy/pasting it, make the text smaller, centre it etc all in the normal 'Compose' view.

If you know of other free image search tools, or images where the Creative Commons License allows commercial use, please share it with the team!

Julie x
www.kipandfig.com