Free or Cheap Photo Options for Bloggers
Adding photos to your posts will give your blog flair and contribute to its overall appeal. Effective photos can be used to convey humor, sympathy, and a variety of other emotions.
You can grab the attention of readers and draw them in with eye-catching photographs that are related to the theme of each post. They can be used to break up text in a post and can also help people navigate through your blog by quickly reminding them where they’ve been and what they’ve seen. Finally, when you add tags to your photos, they can help your posts rank higher in search engine listings and bring more views to your blog.
Many images on the web are protected by copyright law and should not be copied and used without the owner’s permission. To avoid copyright infringement problems, the best resource for blog photos are websites that offer free or low-cost stock images. The list below includes the most popular free or cheap stock photo options for bloggers.
Before you start picking photos from a stock image website, be sure to check for any restrictions on use. Some photo owners request attribution (meaning you must add a caption that gives them credit for the photo), while others would like you to send an email and let them know how the photo will be used. Some free photo websites also ask you to include a link back to their site.
Stock.Xchng
This is the top site for free photos on the web. Recently acquired by Getty Images, Stock.Xchng contains over 390,000 quality images from more than 30,000 photographers. You can search for photos using keywords and then choose from a selection of free photos. Higher-quality images available for purchase from iStockphoto are also displayed. Be sure to check the terms and restriction of each photo before you download or copy since different photographers set different rules.
MorgueFiles
This site offers free high resolution stock images for business and public use. Images can be used without attribution. The site provides a search capability and has a useful feature that allows you to quickly flip through related photos. Each photo’s thumbnail view provides a link to additional information, such as when the photo was uploaded and how many times it’s been downloaded, as well as technical details like focal length and shutter seed. MorgueFile search results also provide easy access to high quality professional images that can be purchased from Dreamstime.
Flickr
This general-purpose photo sharing site is becoming a good source for free photos for blogs. The trick is to search for photos in the Creative Commons license category (which includes over 100 million images). There are five different levels of attribution and the rules can be a little confusing, so read the details carefully. Another drawback with Flickr is that you’re bound to see lots of great photos that aren’t available for use, but with patience, this site can be a good source for blog photos.
FreeFoto.com
More than 130,000 free images organized into more than 3,000 different categories are available on this website. Even so, the selection is more limited than on some of the other leading sites. For example, a recent search for images using the keyword “baby” found 68 images of a Boeing jet (what?) but no free photos of babies. Most photos include a “FreeFoto.com” watermark in the right corner that some blog writers may find intrusive. Using a watermark-free image requires attribution and a link back to FreeFoto.com. Higher quality versions of images are available for sale for off-line use.
This post is written by Erica Moss. Erica is the social media outreach coordinator for the Masters of Nursing program at Georgetown University, which has one of the nation’s leading online FNP programs. Outside of work, she is an avid dog lover who loves photography and meeting new people.
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