Sources for Free and Legal Images

Everyone knows that almost any blog post is better with images. However, getting them can be a difficult matter. With a maze of licensing and fair use issues making it hard to decide what is and is not legal to use, many bloggers don’t wish to use images that they have not taken themselves.

But while using your own images is always the best way to go, there are several great sources to help you find and locate images that you can use as part of your blog posts. In fact, there are some very neat tools designed specifically to help you correctly license and use other people’s photography, art and more.

The best part of all is that these tools are free. They will not cost you a dime to use and, if used correctly, can let you fill up your blog posts with as many images as your heart desires.

Photo Dropper is hands down one of my favorite WordPress plugins. Not only does it make excellent use of Creative Commons-licensed photos, but it solves one of the biggest problems with CC licensing, incomplete compliance with the terms of the license.

Photo Dropper is extremely simple to use. Simply install it in your Wordpress plugins, activate it, set your options and then, on the “Write Post” page you can either click the “PD” icon next to the other media items or scroll down below the post entry box.

From there, you’ll be able to search for keywords related to your post. Photo Dropper will then search Flickr for Creative Commons-licensed works that might fit with your description. When you find one you like, you select the size you want and Photo Dropper inserts it into your post, complete with a CC-compliant attribution line.

Photo Dropper may take some fiddling to get relevant images and you might have to tweak the HTML to get it to fit well in your posts. However, it is still by far the easiest way to insert legal images into your posts.

While the sources above are great for those that need abstract photographs or just something quirky to go with a story, finding an image to go with a news or politics story can be very tricky. Fortunately there are also a series of services to help with that, including GumGum.

The service allows publishers to search through related images and then embed interesting photos as a line of JavaScript code. Why JavaScript? Because that is how GumGum provides the service for free, using the JavaScript to both protect the image and display ads on top of it.

This use of ads is what may upset many. Where Photo Dropper and Zamanta don’t display ads, GumGum does. Also, the use of JavaScript may prevent the image from showing up in some RSS readers. These drawbacks, along with the need to apply for an account, are but a small price to pay for high-quality images.

Update: GumGum has clarified this article and said that they only require a one-time JavaScript insertion and then grant access to the full images, this negates many of these drawbacks. There is also a pay-per view model that allows you to skip the ads and just pay every time the image is displayed.

Zemanta is a Firefox extension/IE plugin that integrates itself with most major blogging platforms, including both self-installed and hosted WordPress blogs, Blogger accounts, MovableType and more. When the user pulls up their blog’s editing interface, they are presented with related links, stories, tags and images that they can use with the post.

The advantage of Zemanta is that its images come from a variety of sources including public domain sources, Creative Commons sources, including Flickr, and other sources that license their images for use at low resolution. This provides a much greater variety of images to the user and it automatically performs a license-compliant insertion of the image into the post.

The drawback to Zemanta is that it can make modifications to the post beyond what is selected. You may need to go through your post’s HTML code thoroughly after insertion to be certain that nothing unwanted was inserted.