A picture in a blog post can help illistrate the story we are telling, make our blog more interesting, and make the blog post a whole lot prettier. But beware, if you are searching Google for pictures to use on your business blog you could be breaking copyright laws.
Thankfully there are risk free alternatives that will let you legally blog guilt free.
Pictures and photos are protected by copyright licenses. There are many different licenses, but the two that are relevant to your search for free pictures for your blog are:
Public Domain Pictures
Public Domain pictures are available for anyone to use. These are safe to use on your blog as long there isn’t something protected by copyright in the picture (like a logo).
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike Pictures
Pictures with the Creative Commons Atribution-ShareAlike license (yup that is a mouth full!) are free to use and modify for commercial use as long as you give the author the credit requested – usually this means to credit them by name and link back to their website.
Sites to Find Free Blog Pictures
You can find a lot of free pictures for your blog with a little research. If you don’t find anything at first, try being a little creative with the search terms you are using.
Flickr
You can search for photos on Flickr with the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license here:
http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/by-sa-2.0/
You can use and edit these photos as long as you give credit to the photographer by linking back to their Flickr profile or their website.
Public Domain Photos
All the pictures on the Public Domain Photos site are free to use for commercial use without needing to give photo credit (but if you are a nice person, so you can do it anyway).
Sites to Find Cheap Blog Pictures
If you really can’t find something you like from the free sites, or you don’t have the time to spend trying to find something that works, there are great options starting from $0.75 on paid sites.
Fotolia
Fotolia has a database of over 10 million pictures and you can download a single extra small resolution picture from $0.75, which should be ok to use on your blog in most cases.
iStockphoto
iStockphoto has a great database of photos and pictures starting from $1 for extra small pictures. I love this site because I always find what I’m looking for without much effort.
Finding Photos in Other Places
There are a lot of public domain, photo sharing and stock photo sites around. If you want to use photos from a site that isn’t listed here, make sure that you read the licensing terms before uploading them onto your site.
Photo Credit to Thibault Martin-Lagardette
