Photos are a really important part of blogging and blog reading for many of us. Unless you’re a photographer yourself, you face a regular challenge of finding interesting and relevant photos to jazz up your blog posts (or illustrate concepts or ideas you are trying to explain).

It’s quite common for many bloggers to source images from the Web, by just copying and pasting photos they like into their own blog posts. This is a gamble. Sometimes the photographer won’t notice, or will be happy for the exposure if you’re including their name in the photo credit, and a link back to their site. But you’re not guaranteed a good reaction – using photos without permission can get you in trouble and generate ill-will towards you and your blog. Because of the time and effort photographers put into their work, they can react very badly if you reproduce their photos without permission – even if you do put a photo credit or link to them. (This makes sense – bloggers hate it when they see their blog posts copied and pasted elsewhere without permission!)

If you love the work of a photographer or visual blogger, and especially if you use a lot of photography on your blog, it is worth thinking about how you can source photograph in a way that works harmoniously with photographers and gives them both acknowledgement and control of how their photography is used. Daydream Lily made a great post about this recently: Some downfalls on visual blogging.

In the past I have done a combination of asking for permission to feature an artist/photographer and other times I go ahead and post the image (more so this) and then link to the person’s flickr or website (linking to weheartit or ffffound is not correct crediting). General blogging etiquette has so far seen this to be perfectly fine. But I’ve decided that I could be doing more, so I’ve made some new rules for myself….

1. Name the file with the creator of the image, this way if the image is re-posted the name of the person will go with the file. Other large profile art blogs do this and I feel I should be doing it too.

2. Try to email people a bit more and ask for permission to blog about them or only blogging people who send a submission to me. Although I’ll have to find a balance on this, as emailing all the time could be pointless (if not very annoying) as well as slow down the spontaneity and pace of a blog.

My #1 tip for using people’s photos is to simply contact them and ask for permission. You’d be surprised how often you get a quick YES, and a thank you for asking. Daydream Lily makes the point that she often wants to use a photo at short notice – which can certainly be a challenge. If you have a blog post coming up on a particular topic or theme, try to put some thought and planning into the images you’ll need, so you have time to contact people for photo permissions if needed.

Why is using photos important for your blog?

There’s a great post over at Famous Bloggers about why you should use great photos to support your blog – Why stunning images are important for your blog and how to find them for free. Photos can help your blog by:

• grabbing attention
• making reading the page easier by giving people a rest from text
• sharing or illustrating the meaning of your post
• promoting SEO (because search engines also look at photo file names)

Using Creative Commons licensed photos

Creative Commons licences are an alternative to the traditional copyright, and are often used by photographers, musicians and other content creators who want to allow people to use, republish and sometimes even remix their work. You may have noticed that we’ve been using lots of great Creative Commons-licensed images for the Nuffnang blog lately!

There are six different Creative Commons licenses, so make sure you check to see which one the photographer has chosen – usually they require attribution (that you include their name as the photographer) – and they sometimes specify that you can only use their photo for non-commercial work. You can read about the different licenses on the Creative Commons Licences about page.

Finding Creative Commons licensed photos

The great news is that Flickr allows you to search their whole archive for Creative Commons licensed photos! Get started over at the Flickr Creative Commons page – you can even narrow your search by the type of license required (ie if you need to find a photo that’s authorised for use by a business).

Check out the Famous Bloggers post linked above for other ideas on where you can find great free photos.

Have you got any tips for sourcing great images for your blog? Please share them in comments!