This is strange place for me to be. I have noticed that quite a number of my posts are without images. Which is a problem in so far as it is well known that images make a huge difference to audience engagement. The challenge that I have, as do many bloggers (I use that term loosely in my case), is that I don’t always have an image on hand that fits the topic of my post.
As a photographer it is always vexing when people use your images without permission, even for piddling little blogs like this one. On the other hand it can be a real pain trying to get permission to use photographs and even harder to use them for free. (And I remember well the pain of being a full time photographer, whose sole source of income is from photography, being asked for free use of your images.) Fortunately there is a solution.
Creative Commons was born in 2001 and is a way for people to give permission for their work to be shared in specific ways that they are comfortable with. You can read all about it here. It really is a great idea, especially if you want your work to get out there without it being used by people who could afford to pay you for your efforts.
creative commons licensed ( BY-NC-SA ) flickr photo shared by Nick Kenrick .
There are lots of great resources to help people find images they want to use. Flickr is one of them. A massive pool of photography that has many images licensed in such a way as you can use them without having to pay. If you use flickr then there is also a great tool I came across via Free Technology for Teachers. It’s called the Flickr CC Attribution Helper, which makes it very straight forward for you to extract either the html for blog use or correct credit when using images in in a presentation for example. I used it for this post.
So if in future you either need to use images or you would like to share them then check out Creative Commons.
