Use photos in blog posts (with a Creative Commons license)

Shakespeare went to school here
(CC BY 2.0 license by Ell Brown, Flickr)

If you want people to read your online writing, you need to use pictures.

Maybe people could care less about Shakespeare's education. But I put a picture of the grammar school he attended and -- blam! -- instant interest. Well, at least more than if I just posted a large column of visually boring text.

This is the digital age, and that means this is the age of communicating with photos all the time. So find a photo to give your blog posts a hook.

But don't just use any photo that you can find! The best practice is to make use of content that has been published with a Creative Commons license, as I will briefly explain.

Use Creative Commons-licensed Photos

It's easy to use Google image search or something similar to find pictures. But do you have permission to reuse those photos? It's always best either to use your own photos, or else to use those for which permission has been granted ahead of time for reuse through what is known as a Creative Commons license.

If you don't know what Creative Commons licenses are, these essentially grant permission from the copyright holder, ahead of time, for others to make use of their content. It's a wonderful way to stay legal but not to get mired in the bog of seeking permissions from rights holders. Using Creative Commons (either as a content creator or user) builds trust and promotes creative uses of our new media. The person who took the photo above used the CC BY license:

This license means you just have to mention the person who created the work in order to use it (as I did in the caption of the photo above, though you can include the attribution at the bottom of your blog post or anywhere obvious). There are other licenses that may be more restrictive (not allowing derivative works, or commercial usage). It's not that complicated.

Ways to Find Creative Commons-licensed Photos

There are advanced search features on Google Image Search or on Flickr by which you can search only for creative commons-licensed content. An easy way to do this, however, is to use search.creativecommons.org where you can search any of many services, automatically filtering only for licensed material. That's what I did to find the photo of the The photo I found above was easily found using the CC search engine, applied to Flickr:

If you use the Firefox browser, you can get a plug-in to change your browser's search box to use the Creative Commons search.