According to the MDG Advertising study, articles with images generate 94% more visits than posts without them. Do you also want 94% more readers? Would you like to get them without paying a penny? Then continue reading.
Images and copyrights
You can not use on your blog any image you find on the internet. By default, they are protected by copyright. However, some authors offer their photos, illustrations or vectors for free under one of several licenses.
Let’s see the three most widespread.
CC0 license (public domain)
If the author allows free use of his images under the CC0 license, you can use them for personal and commercial projects. Besides, you do not even have to give credit to the author.
CC BY
With this license you can also use the images for personal and commercial projects. However, you have to give attribution to the author.
What does it mean to give attribution to the author? In case of using the photograph on a blog, it is usually necessary to mention the name of the author and to link to his website.
CC BY NC License
Images under this license must not be used for commercial purposes. In addition, you have to give attribution to the author.
Free image banks
Image banks are websites where you can find images to download in large quantities.
The largest free image bank is called Pixabay. It has photos, illustrations and vectors of comparable quality with commercial image banks. All this offers under the less restrictive license – CC0.
There are also many smaller ones. Often appear new ones, so it is worthwhile from time to time to search in Google terms such as free stock photos, CC0 image bank or Creative Commons images.
Free images on Flickr
Flickr is a social network for photographers. Some of them upload their photographs under one of the licenses mentioned above. As it is a large community, you can find millions of free photos there.
You should be aware that not everything you find on Flickr you can use in your blog. To find what you are looking for more easily, filter the internal search results to display only the images with one of the Creative Commons licenses.
If you want to see an example of a free image gallery on Flickr, you can visit mine.
Free images directly in your blog
If you have created your blog using WordPress (which I recommend), it is nothing easier than installing the Pixabay plugin (called Pixabay Images). How does it work?
Instead of visiting this image bank, downloading the photos from there and uploading them to your blog, you can insert the images into your articles without leaving the WordPress control panel.
Paid alternatives
Although the offer of free images is quite broad today, occasionally you may need something very specific. In these cases it could be useful one of the following paid alternatives:
The prices depend mainly on the image size. In general we can say that the prices for a photograph of ideal size for blogs usually start at a little more than $1.
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Hi Petr,
Came across this post and would like to thank for such a thoughtful article. I really l like how you touch upon the subject of CC. I’m wondering you have checked out the image bank called rawpixel.com and what you would think about it? Come check us out!
Cheers,
Tip
Hi Tip,
This is first time I hear about Rawpixel and I really like what I see there. Your photos are not only very good, but also the licence clearly states that the photos come with model/property release what makes your image bank pretty unique.
I know that many other image banks like Pixabay require the model/property release in their Terms and conditions, but there is always a risk that the photographer is like most of us who “agree” with the Terms without reading them 🙂