Finding Images You Can Use

Photo by Randy Son of Robert's.

If you are looking for good images to use on your web sites, blogs, squidoo lens, etc. here is a secret weapon.

Flickr has a number (i.e. > 16 million) images that users have uploaded under the Creative Commons Attribution License. This license permits you to use the photo on personal or commercial sites, crop it, tweak it, etc. as long as you give credit to the owner.

That's the first part of the secret. The second part is how to search for just the images with this license, and find good ones in the mix.

This link goes directly to the search box on Flickr for Attribution only licenses. Enter any search term and you'll get a list of pretty mediocre shots. So the next step... above the list of thumbnails returned by the search, you'll see the default sort is "Most Relevant." Click on "Interesting" instead and you should have some pretty images that have gone through a certain amount of "crowd sourcing" for quality. And there you go. You can't use these for t-shirts and products (like zazzle and cafepress), but it's a great source to add impact to your articles and stories published on the web.