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Everyone knows that almost any blog post is better with images. However, getting them can be a difficult matter. With a maze of licensing and fair use issues making it hard to decide what is and is not legal to use, many bloggers don’t wish to use images that they have not taken themselves.
Photo Dropper is hands down one of my favorite WordPress plugins. Not only does it make excellent use of Creative Commons-licensed photos, but it solves one of the biggest problems with CC licensing, incomplete compliance with the terms of the license.
Zemanta is a Firefox extension/IE plugin that integrates itself with most major blogging platforms, including both self-installed and hosted WordPress blogs, Blogger accounts, MovableType and more. When the user pulls up their blog’s editing interface, they are presented with related links, stories, tags and images that they can use with the post.
While the sources above are great for those that need abstract photographs or just something quirky to go with a story, finding an image to go with a news or politics story can be very tricky. Fortunately there are also a series of services to help with that, including GumGum.
Similar to GumGum, PicApp lets you search through newsworthy images to find ones that might interest you and then lets you embed the one that works best as a JavaScript. However, PicApp also lets you search for “creative” as well as “editorial” images, giving you a slightly wider variety.
Voxant Newsroom is another service that functions similar to GumGum or PicApp, letting users embed content, this time as a Flash app. But this service, unlike the former two, get their images exclusively from major mainstream media outlets including the Associated Press, CBS News and more.
Conclusions
The bottom line is this, content licensing is hard, even with Creative Commons. Fortunately though, there are a series of sites that have come up to do the hard work for you and let you easily and legally use images with your blog posts.
In addition to these sites, there are also a slew of stock photography sites that let you download and use photographs and images for free or a small license. However, they generally provide no help with the insertion process and, if there are licensing terms, provide little help in complying with them.
A solution such as these tools can help not only keep your site legal, but speed up the writing process dramatically, saving you time and money.
Related Content in The Splashpress Media New Media Channel
WP Hack: Creative Commons Copyright Tag
Published on Tuesday, May 25, 2004 for http://www.bloggingpro.com/A Primer on Creative Commons - The Web's Most Prominent Content Licensing System
Published on Friday, November 05, 2010 for http://www.freelancewritinggigs.com/How to Find Free Images to Use on Your Blog without Breaking Copyright Laws
Published on Monday, September 06, 2010 for http://www.businesslogs.com/
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