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Spruce Up Your Blog with Images, Courtesy of Flickr and Creative Commons



When blogs are just text, they’re boring. This is a problem with lots of legal blogs.

An easy way to prettify your blog is to add images to it. They don’t have to perfectly tie into the post, but they should be close and visually appealing.

But where do you find free images you can use? Flickr, everyone’s favorite photo sharing site.

With Flickr you can easily search for pictures based on any term(s) that might come to mind. The odds are great that you’ll find tons of neat photos to use.

But how do you make sure you aren’t violating copyright by using them? Use Flickr’s advanced search options to only find photos licensed under the Creative Commons. These pictures will usually be free to use on a post, as long as you give proper attribution to the author.

Follow these simple steps to search for Creative Commons Flickr pictures:

1. Use the drop down menu by the “Search” option to access the search form (search everyone’s photos):

Flickr search menu

2. Click the “Advanced Search” link on the search form:

Flickr search advanced

3. Choose your Creative Commons searching options (you’ll need to scroll down on the form):

Flickr search cc

4. Enter your search terms and browse the pictures.

When you find a picture you want to use, you can easily check it’s copyright license on the main picture page. Just look in the right information bar for “Additional Information”:

Flickr cc

You can understand more about the license by clicking the “Some Rights Reserved” link. The icons here tell us that you can use the picture, with attribution (the “by” icon), and you cannot alter the picture (the “=” sign).

Now go spruce up your blog posts. You have no excuse not to!

[tags]flickr, creative commons, copyright, images[/tags]

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