Great Places to Find Pics for Blogs and Websites
Posted by Eric Pointer at 11:51 am
Scott Monty, Head of Ford Motor Company Social Media, Provided the following on his blog…
Finding Images
Let’s start with the basics. You need an image for a blog post. Where should you look? There are a number of great resources that are either low-cost or free:
- Flickr The grand-daddy of all image sites. Flickr is a very powerful community with millions of photos at your disposal. There’s an advanced search capability that makes it easy to pinpoint what you’re looking for. Check out their Outstanding Shots,
- everystockphoto.com Is just that. A full range of free images with various levels of licensing.
- StockVault, according to its site, is a stock photo sharing site where photographers, designers and students can share their photographs and images with each other. Its sole purpose is to collect and archive medium and high resolution photos that designers and students can share and use for personal and non-commercial designs.
- OpenPhoto A little more barebones than the other sites, but with a variety of content that is sourced in a wiki-like way.
Two great tools to help refine the image searching process:
- Compfight will help you find images by text or by tag and will allow you to change the settings on licensing, original photos and safe search. The visual layout of the images is impressive and will help you more quickly assess what works and what doesn’t.
- FlickrStorm is a brainstorming tool that lays out the images based on a search term that you enter and that also lets you change the settings on image rights. You can add images to your tray as you’re browsing, so you can compare them later.
A note about using Flickr photos: if you plan to embed a Flickr photo in your site, there are guidelines that you need to follow. Namely, you need to use the HTML code available from the “Share this” link and provide a link back to the original photo. Please be sure to abide by Flickr’s community guidelines.
If you’d like to use your own photographs but you don’t feel quite comfortable with your ability, you can check Darren Rowse’s Digital Photography Tips, or grab a copy of Scott Kelby’s The Digital Photography Book (as well as Volume 2 and Volume 3). And a camera like a Canon EOS Rebel T1i or a Nikon D90 DX wouldn’t hurt, either.
“Just wanted to drop you a quick note to let you know that I turned on my lead gen campaign at 2:30 today and by 5:00 I have had 8 hits!! ”
