Often you don’t have the photos you need for a blog post, so you want to go and grab some from the Creative Commons community, but don’t know where to start.
This tutorial will show you how to find great Creative Commons photos on Flickr quickly, and then resize them, optimize them for the web, put them on your blog, and properly credit the photographer with a link in less than 10 minutes, no special software is necessary.
Before you get started you’ll want to open these three websites:
http://www.smushit.com/ysmush.it/
If you’re a working blogger interested in hearing regularly about new opportunities, you may be interested in a project I’m working on.
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Great tutorial Matt. But important to note that – even under Creative Commons, there may well be restrictions on the use of the photo (e.g. on the photo you chose, the photographer has “Some rights reserved” – in this case, you may not use the photo for commercial purposes). In short there are a variety of Creative Commons licenses and it’s prudent to note/click on the “Some rights reserved” on any photo to be sure you understand just what the artist allows/how the artist wants the photo to be attributed. A full explanation of the various CC licenses can be found here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
Also, I find it handy to include the artists name when I download/rename the file to my desktop – that way, down the road I can look up the licensing and attribute the photo correctly if I reuse it somewhere else.
You make a good point Dyann. I did gloss over the differences in types of CC licenses. I did that, though, because this tutorial is for non-commercial bloggers and does not include altering the photo.
It is important that people note: if they want to alter the photo, or to use a photo for commercial purposes, they need to be sure that the CC license allows it.
Thanks for this!! I have been so reluctant to use creative commons images as I have been so worried that I will accidentally do the wrong thing.
Glad I could help!
I used to source all of my photos from Flickr. But then, I started becoming more careful. So I am using sxc.hu instead. So I have the license to really use the pictures on my blog.