Where to Find Blog Images

If you read my fellow blogger Stacy's post a few days ago about why she removed photos from her blog posts, you might be wondering if there's any easy way to find images that are okay to use.

Don't worry, you don't need to resign yourself to posting blocks of text with the occasional image you took yourself. Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization, provides copyright licenses so people can give permission for their images (as well as music, videos, and other media) to be used by others.

Copyright holders can specify which ways they will allow their images to be used. They might decide to allow non-commercial use only, for example. The symbols above will be somewhere near the photo on the original website and specify the uses that are allowed. But the good news for bloggers is that almost any of these images can be used in blog posts.

(A small caveat: some licenses request attribution of the image, so it's still important to read the license to make sure you're following the license holder's requirements. You can see an example of this on the photo below.)

To find images licensed under Creative Commons, go to http://search.creativecommons.org. You can search a bunch of different sites from this page, including Google Images and Flickr. While you might not find the wealth of images you would in a general search, you can rest easy knowing you're staying on the right side of copyright law.

Hooray for the Internet by goopy mart is licensed under CC BY 2.0