SwitchTip: Find Pictures for Your Blog

You’ve got to love the old clichés. A picture’s worth 1000 words – but, in many cases, talk is cheap.  There are many reasons to have an image on your blog posts.  It will help catch the reader’s eye, to hook them into reading the post, but it can also provide some valuable SEO juice to help your post be found when someone is searching for content that you’ve written about.

For many bloggers, it’s not uncommon to just use Google image search and find an image that you like to represent your post.  If your blog is for personal use only, this practice is fairly common and it’s unlikely someone will come after you for showing their picture to your 50 readers.  But for many of us, the blog is a vehicle to help us promote our business, and if you use protected images you are violating the copyright.  Stanford.edu has some great information on copyright and fair use.
Stock photography sites are a great place to find pictures, and they can usually be found for a dollar or two.  The nice thing about buying stock photos is that they are usually royalty-free, which means you only have to pay once to use the image.
Another way that you can find images to use legally on your website is to explore the public domain or creative commons.  Here are a few sites that you can use to find free images for your next blog post:
morgueFile. If you’ve ever wondered where good pics go when they die, you’ll be happy with this site.  A website by creatives for creatives.  I like this site for their massive images and good selection, but I love it for the ability to crop and post directly from their site.
Stock.XCHNG. Another great site with excellent content.  394642 photos online right now, in a variety of searchable categories.
Google Images. Yes, I know this doesn’t look quite right.  But this image search engine lets you filter by license type. If you click on the “advanced search” link, you can change the usage rights to find images that you can use.  I choose “labeled for commercial reuse with modification.”
No matter where you find your image, it’s probably best to check to see if the license allows you to use it in the way that you want.  A few seconds of checking beforehand can save you a lot of time and money in the long run.
If you want to see if your personal images are being used anywhere, there are some tools that you can use to find them.  TinEye and GazoPa are two popular reverse image search tools.
A great image can help your blog be read, be found, and be remembered – but it’s not worth stealing someone else’s creative efforts to enhance your own.