How To Find Free Photos For Your Blog

Looking for free photos for your blog or website? The bad news is that you can’t just grab them from the net. You’ll face a whopping big fine if you do.

You can, however, find free photos on the web that you can use on your blog or, in some cases, on your website and in other marketing material.

Search tools

The tool I like best is PhotoPin, which searches through millions of creative commons photos on Flickr.

To find photos via PhotoPin, use the search box and type in any topic (e.g. fat orange cats). Preview the photo, and click “get photo” to download the picture as well as the proper attribution link.

Here’s a video on how it works.

Creative Commons (CC) licenses

When photos have a creative commons copyright license it means that you are free to use them, but only under certain conditions.

Think of it as a “some rights reserved” license.

The most important thing to keep in mind about these photos is that they must be attributed and used under the terms listed in the license.

Here’s an example of how to do it.

Title? “Hank getting a kiss from Annabelle”

Author? “Dana” – linked to her profile page

Source? “Hank getting a kiss from Annabelle” – linked to original Flickr page

License? “Creative Commons Attribution-NoDervis” – linked to license deed

Note: you can also write the deed as CC BY-ND 2.0

The photo credits can go in the caption.

Photo credits: It’s not pink. It’s magenta! © 2011 55Lanely69, CC BY 2.0. Festive three doc © 2012 Andrew King, CC BY-SA 2.0

Here’s how.

Or you can include the photo credits at the end of your blog post.

See below or the end of this blog post for an example.

Photo credits

Creative commons lets you share your material and creativity with the world. If you want to find out how you can mark your own material with a CC license go here.