Blogging Sueblimely

How do you go about finding free images for your website or blog? I recently talked about the best sites for good free images but you may prefer to do a general search rather than looking within one particular site. This way you are likely to have a wider range of images to choose from.Some of the free stock image sites are aligned to non free sites and the free images may not be distinguished from the paid. It is frustrating to find an image you like on a free site to discover that it is from the paying site. Although it may not cost very much, you cannot usually just buy one image and have to purchase multiple credits. These credits will buy you more images but you may not need more; or not during the time you are given to use up the credits.

Image Search Tools

Creative Commons Images

• Creative Commons Search by Creative Commons – searches Google, Yahoo and Flickr for Creative Commons works. If you want to use an image on a non commercial site then you can use any image you find here. Additional search options allow you to look for:
  • only CC works that you can modify, adapt, or build upon, and or
  • works that can be used for commercial purposes.

Source: g-hat Flickr

• Compfight is a site that provides a quick method of searching for Flickr images. The results are displayed as quick loading thumbnails, 250 to a page. Clicking on a thumbnail takes you to the photo’s Flickr page. The option is provided to search within tags or all text for Creative Commons usage only or for Creative Commons commercial usage allowed. Still check the CC licence if you intend to adapt the image to make sure this is allowed.

• Flickr’s Creative Commons Page search for photos according to their type of Creative Commons License. I would use this if I knew I was going to edit a photo otherwise I find Compfight is quicker.
• Every Stock Photo – a search engine for free photos from many sources. View a photo’s license by clicking on the license icon, below and left of photos or use the advanced search function to choose which sort of license you want.
• Firefox – Use the Creative Commons search engine that is built into Firefox by choosing the CC icon from the drop down menu to the right of the Firefox search box.

• Wikimedia Commons is a database of 3,089,392 freely usable media files which includes images from these sites.

Source Cool Image Bank Ios – memories of holidays long past

Images without Creative Commons search criteria

• Google Image Search comes up with a treasure trove of images but, as the search results contain images from all Google listed websites, you are unable to use a great deal of them; for copyright reasons. I do use this search but only for ideas when creating my own images and for personal browsing purposes. Today for example after doing an interview with Kuanyin on Blog Blond my interest in Maui was peeked and I ended up searching for images of Hawaiian volcanoes.

Source: mattsabo17 Flickr

• Pixsy – a search engine for images and videos, including stock photos. Allows search to be customized by criteria – vector graphics, black and white, greyscale and backgrounds, digital photos. Categories covered are: News, Celebrities, Sports, Travel, Viral, Video, Entertainment, Music, Stock Photos, Edge and Miscellaneous. (Pixsy is the search engine powering Compfight, Lycos image search, Mokoseek and various other sites that distracted me from writing this post)

Images from people you know

Ask a fellow blogger if they would mind you using an image from their blog – they may be pleased to allow it to get a backlink. How are these for pairs of crocs??

Source: Ultraviolet Observations aka Sueblimely’s daughter

I have justed added a new site to my free image post – a smallish collection as yet but very impressive – unprofound.com

You have likely heard of Ed Dale’s 30 Day Challenge, as it is now in its third year, but if you are not in the business of making money from your blog you may not have taken too much notice. I suggest you do consider joining in even if you are not interested in the money making aspects of blogging; because of the resources and tools you will learn about which are useful to all bloggers. Over 30 days Ed presents a series of video tutorials (with transcripts) with the aim of showing how to make money from blogging. Easy to understand step by step instructions are given for participants to follow. To accompany the videos there are forums to answer questions and provide support. Joining in a Challenge group is a good idea to develop a closer support network with a smaller group of fellow participants. Each group has its own forum. There is even a browser toolbar available to make it easier to follow the challenge.

Although I have not ventured into online money making I have joined the 30 Day Challenge for the second time. I was newer to blogging the first time round and learned a lot about blog promotion, social networking, blogging tools and search engine optimization. Knowing that new content is produced for each Challenge and that the tools available to us rapidly increase and change, I felt that I would again benefit from participating. There is no pressure to follow each step rigidly and if you cannot find time to view the daily offerings you can catch up another time.

The Challenge actually starts/started on 1st August but it is not too late to join in. There are some recommended “pre-season” preparation activities which are useful in their own right. Not being patient enough to watch videos I read the transcripts of these so that I could pick out areas that I thought may be new to me. This time round the use of the Flock browser is being recommended and there are guides to help you get started with it. I am close to moving over to Flock from Firefox and will do so once I have configured it with my favorite extensions. At present, I always have it open alongside Firefox for its social networking, Flickr and YouTube tools.

I followed Ed’s example by creating a Google Subscribe Link for Sueblimely. You can subscribe via the “Add my expertise to your Google web searches” in my sidebar. Here are the FAQs for Google Subscribe Links if you are interested in creating your own.

You can join up by via my 30 Day Challenge Refferal Link or via the 30 Day Challenge site directly and find me in Team Lightening There are prizes to be won for those with the most referrals. I don’t expect to be anywhere in the running for these but it would be good not to have a referral point value of zero

Entrecard has just joined forces with SezWho. “SezWhat?” you may be saying – I will explain what it is later in the post but firstly want to talk about Entrecard itself and why this partnership may be very useful to bloggers.

Entrecard has been a great way of bringing visitors to blogs and creating a means for members to get known but it has fallen short in producing significantly extra comments and expanding individual blog’s reader communities. Entrecard has always had higher aims, with goals of bringing not only traffic but also audiences, readership and community participation. I agree with Graeme, the mastermind behind Entrecard, when he says that “Commenting is the second most important thing for you to do after writing quality posts. It was due to his aim to use “The same credits that power our culture responsible for millions of blogger-to-blogger visits each week … to help power a culture that comments on posts as well” that has resulted in the partnership with SezWho.

Now on to SezWho itself:

SezWho is a commenting/comment rating tool, which calls itself a profiling service and engagement platform. It creates a ‘profile’ for your commenters; hovering over their profile image or “check me out” link brings up a box which shows you the latest comments they have made and their SezWho ratings. It allows you to rate posts and the the comments and follow comments via RSS. If you are not registered or logged in when rating then the rating will be processed as anonymous but this has much less impact on member reputation scores. You do not have to have your own site to register with SezWho.

The Profile that pops up for Colin Campbell’s comments.

Its use is aimed at giving highly rated members “web-wide recognition for their insights and expertise”, “thought leadership”, and an increase in traffic. The theory is that the number and quality of comments on your blog will grow.

The Entrecard connection is that credits are awarded to members who comment on SezWho enabled sites. The amount of credits given is based on how highly the comment is rated by those who vote on it – ranging from 1 to 10 Entrecard credits. The idea is that quality comments gain the most, quick meaningless comments left merely for backlinks and spam comments will luck out.

will give SezWho users who receive ratings of 4 stars or more with credits to advertise on its network of blogs. This is an interesting approach, as it connects reputation with a direct reward.

How to integrate SezWho with your site (currently supported platforms are WordPress versions up to 2.6 (2.6 is beta still), Movable Type, Blogger, Drupal and phpBB):

• Create an account with SezWho
• WordPress – download and intall the SezWho plugin by upload to your plugin folder, activate it. Then enter the blog id sent to you with your registration confirmation email in the SezWho plugin’s setup.
• Blogger – add the provided code to a HTML/Javascript page element.

You can view your own profile on your SezWho page:

Colin must lead thoughts to better places than I do

As I have only just installed the plugin I do not have any ratings, I do have ‘Star Power’ of 2.5 as this “community ranking” is not purely based on ratings?

Advantages

• If this new system takes off and more Entrecarders do comment, rather than merely dropping on you, your blogs bounce rate will improve.
• SezWho does not host any site content. All published and user-supplied content remains on – and is controlled by – the original site. It does not make off with your comments like some similar programs do.
• Backlinks are created for yourself and commenters.
• If you are an extraordinary commenter, a thought leader among bloggers, then your reputation will spread far and wide. If you are average then it may not make any difference to you, although I am sure the word will get round if particular blogs have generous comment ratings. I am open to that word . In my case I am sure I will not want to favor one regular commenter over another so will rate them all well, just because I am pleased to see them here. If you are new then I should imagine that I will vary my ratings although I love my comments so much that no doubt I will be generous – it will most likely depend on the mood I am in and if you are using a name that includes such words as casino. (my jury is still out with regards to the keyword luv plugin but I will save that for another post)

Disadvantages

• Receiving low ratings could lead you to have less confidence in your writing, even though it may be that your particular commenters do not want to use the system.
• It could be looked upon as bribing people to comment *
• If you write quality posts you are going to get plenty of comments anyway (I do not believe this always to be the case as it depends on your type of blog and readership)
• Adding to your workload by commenting on blogs just for your ratings is yet another way to divert you from writing and concentrating on your own readers.

Reading:

• On Entrecard’s blog Announcing the Partnership of Entrecard and SezWho
• Entrecard fan Joe Tech’s Top 10 reasons why the Entrecard – SezWho partnership is Important for Bloggers gives a positive review. The 70+ comments on the post show agreement with this view.
• * Entrecard + SezWho = Meh on Monkey Fables and Tales which talks less favorably about SezWho and not wanting to “bribe” people to comment. The 50+ comments on the post show agreement with this view.
• SezWho in operation on a phpBB forum on the SezWho Support Forum

To give you an opportunity to try out SezWho on this site I am will pose some questions.

• Based on this post or on your usage of SezWho are you in favor or against?
• Do you think this partnership is a positive or negative step for Entrecard.
• Are the multitude of peripheral blogging activities available to us now having a general effect of

• reducing blog posting frequency and quality or:
• taking us away from commenting on blogs? Is blog conversation moving to social media sites instead?

I have spent considerable time researching the best sites to find online free images/stock images, along with their copyright/ Creative Commons licences. Some of these sites will probably already be familiar to you but others new, as they were to me. I hope you find this of use, as it makes the time spent all worthwhile. Sites are listed in alphabetical order.

Free Images

• BurningWell – a repository for public domain (free for any use) images. Donations welcomed – anyone have any Melbourne images they could upload, Melbourne is not represented there at all!

Waterlillies – Fiji

• Flickr Usage: image pages display their Creative Commons licences
• Free Digital Photos Dot Net – Royalty free images Usage: commercial and non-commercial.
• Free Photos Bank Usage: see terms
• Free Public Domain Photos You may use these images for any purpose, including commercial

Morning Glory

• Freerange Stock free stock photos – Freerange is an advertising revenue supported photographic community – photographers get paid when users click on the ads that appear next to their submissions. Usage: commercial and personal.
• Free Web Page Headers – Usage: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License.
• freewebphoto Usage: Free for linked web use
• Image*After a free online photo and texture collection. You can download and use any image or texture from the site Categories covered: architecture, art, food, nature, industry, humanoids, human parts, landscapes, objects, vehicles. (pretty much everything) – Usage: commercial or personal but no redistribution.

• Kave Wall – Free Stock Photos, Images and Textures. Usage: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License.
• morgueFile – free high resolution stock photos. Usage: commercial personal.
• Openphoto is a wiki-based photography site. All images on the site are marked with Creative Commons attribution. Anyone can register and upload images. Users can browse or search by tags to find photos they are interested in.
• Pixel Perfect Digital Free Stock Photos Usage: Personal non-commercial use, restrictions apply for commercial use (also features premium low-cost images from Dreamstime).

• Microsoft Clip Art
• StockVault – stock photo sharing website. Over 100,000 images. Usage: Free for personal and non-commercial purposes.
• Stock.XCHNG – over 350.000 free user submitted images – terms of use vary but are displayed on each image page.

Smaller Free Image Sites

FreeImages.co.uk – over 2,500 free stock images. Usage: Only a link to site required. *

unprofound.com which was started by one photographer, Jim, has now grown to become a “a global collaboration of photographers” all generously sharing their work freely with the only restrictions seeming to be on redistribution of the photos. Check the FAQ if you are unsure. No attribution is required although I think that giving credit is the right thing to do wherever possible. Search is via photo color or photographer and a search tool still to be refined. I had trouble choosing only one image out of this wonderful collection of high quality photos and I hope to see this site grow and become well known.

Specialist Free Image sites

There are so many of these that I cannot mention them all here but I would appreciate it if anyone can recommend any that are worthwhile checking out.

These sites contain images relating to specific topics or genres, those that have been designated as public domain, creative commons or are of an age where copyright has expired.

• Gimp Savvy Photo Archive – images come from three main sources: the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) Usage: copyright free, some restrictions with regards to privacy for commercial usage.
• Old Book Illustrations includes galleries of animals, plants, landscapes, characters, scenes, buildings and monuments, science and technology and miscellaneous illustrations scanned from old books.

Source

• Plants of Hawaii – Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License

Agapanthus aka Mt Eliza leprosy Source

• The Best Copyright-Free Photo Libraries - a post on gov.watch with links to specific public domain (copyright free) government photo libraries.
• PhotoEverywhere UK Free Travel Images Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License – Free to share and remix with attribution. *
• Wikipedia:Public domain image resources includes links to sites of historical images, 2,600 realist painters (many in the public domain), copyright expired visual artworks, scanned images from old books, logos, stamps, US government sites as well as general collections.
• wellcome images -
  2000 years of human culture Usage: unless otherwise stated – Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial version 2.0 or Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales

Crystals of a DNA repair protein bound to DNA

Source Bernard O’Hara & Renos Savva, Wellcome Images

Personal Photo Sites

Personal sites where images are offered for download free of charge:

• PD photo.org contains public domain photos taken by the site’s owner, Jon Sullivan who also has a blog, aptly titled, Jon Sullivan

John reminds us that if an image is in the public domain then it must stay there. You cannot claim it as your own nor add any extra restrictions on its use. He also advises that it is wise to assume that no model release has been given for commercial use; unless stated otherwise or indicated by its Creative Commons Licence.

Future posts in this series will include image search engines, directories of free image sites, where to find low cost images, useful image tools and Firefox image tools. I know because most of them are written already

* New sites added since original post. Last update: 17 July 08

I have recently been trying out PhotoCrank, a kind of annotation/comment system for web images, and have had some fun browsing blogs that have installed this feature.

PhotoCrank allows the addition of word bubbles, graphics, comments and tags to any photo on any website. Those who have installed the browser extension can use the feature on any photo of any website.. In addition to the actual cranks, comments can made relating to those cranks.

If you add the Photocrank engine to your blog then any reader can use the feature on the images you have enabled for its use. You retain control over the comments and can delete those you do not think suitable. You can of course add your own annotations too. A widget is available for websites which shows the Cranks you have created yourself. PhotoCrank has been out for a while but a new version has recently been implemented with extra features.

An example is probably the best way to explain the concept: The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, by the fake Steve Jobs, uses Photocrank and I think his blog is a prime example of good usage. Some of the comments are hilarious. You can see an example of the PhotoCrank widget in his sidebar too: Here is an example from his post entitled:

Confession: I have a really hard time deciding what to order in restaurants

Image before pressing the play button:

Image combining three of the comments

Total Diatribe is running regular “photo caption contests” using PhotoCrank

There are hundreds of images and blank bubbles to chose from. When you find those you like you can add them to favorites to find them again easily. Here is an example from one page of my favorites library:

The “Cranked” photos are displayed on the PhotoCrank website and your crank’d photos get syndicated throughout the PhotoCrank network of blogs, providing some extra link love for your site. Members can “follow” others I can see some blogs would find this a useful plugin to create a conversation around their published images in general or as a feature to use on designated posts only. Personal bloggers could write posts specifically for publishing images to be cranked. One blog I think would be ideal for the plugin is MagnetoBoldToo – little to her knowledge I have added cranks to a couple of her recent posts.

(For anyone already using PhotoCrank on their blogs, a new method of disabling cranks on individual images has just been implemented. In the PhotoCrank Options Menu on published photos (the gray button on the bottom right of the photo) click on Adminstration and uncheck the Allow Image To Be Cranked option)

PS – This is for Kelly who was keen to find out what PhotoCranks I had left on her blog images. The first is on the Mosh post and the second on the Be afwaid. Be vewy afwaid Sweet Potato image. Very corny I know.