by Jennifer Gibbs

Created on: March 11, 2009

How to Find Photos You Can Legally Use - Without Stealing Royalty Free Images for Your Articles

There are usually two ways to do something: the easy way or the right way. When it comes to adding the finishing touches to your article submission, one of the most effective ways to polish your piece is to incorporate poignant, compelling photos that really illustrate the main theme or idea of your prose.

The EASY thing to do is simply perform a Google image search and plug in your favorite top searches. Unfortunately, not only is this un-original, it's also incredibly illegal. Actually, it's known as copyright infringement. While a number of slothful writers, website developers/designers and a host of other professionals try to fool themselves into believing that no one will know or that won't get caught are, well, just fools. Although they may not be "found out" that day, the next day or even that year, selfish shortcuts have an awful habit of coming back to bite you in the proverbial rear end. Perhaps the publisher will discover what you've done and pull your article, demanding to be reimbursed. However, it's just as likely that the original copyright holder (you know, the photographer who actually TOOK the photo) will ferret you out and prosecute you to the fullest extent of the law. In either case, you lose.

So, if simply searching and plugging in an image isn't the right route to take, what is?

As a professional writer myself, I've been there. Fortunately, in my quest to do the right thing, I stumbled upon a great solution that protects me legally and is still 100% free. Better yet, you'll have a tough time believing how simple it actually is...

The secret is the image hosting site http://www.flickr.com. Flickr is a site where photographers (both amateur and professional) are able to upload and showcase their photos. There are literally MILLIONS of pictures hosted on the site, and they're search-able by a number of different criteria. If you're in need of photographs and images that can be freely used and incorporated in commercial content, simply click on the "Advanced Search" option next to the text bar and tab.

Once you've arrived at the advanced search page (you may have to click to it from a simple search response), simply plug in the term you're looking for and scroll down to the bottom of the page. You'll notice that there are several different options:

Only search within the Creative Commons-licensed content

Find content to use commercially OR

Find content to modify, adapt or build upon

Be sure to select the option "Find content to use commercially" and browse through the resulting images until you've found one that's a perfect match for the article, ebook or other content you happen to be working on. Once you've plugged the image in, be sure to credit the photographer for their work and (whenever possible) provide a link back to their Flickr.com page or another website, etc. they prefer to promote.

Now, not only will you have free photos, images (and now, even videos!) to integrate into your content, you've also got a way to do it right - 100% legally.

So, the next time you're tempted to infringe, head on over to Flickr.com instead.

Believe me, you'll thank me later!

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