What I’m currently reading: Deceived by Randy Wayne White
If you’re a blogger, you may use images you find on the web for your posts. The correct way to do this is either using pictures you’ve licensed, or those that don’t require a specific license for re-use. I use a lot of Flickr Creative Commons images, and they have always worked well for me.
But the Flickr search mechanism, IMHO, isn’t as good as the one provided by Google. So I was pleasantly surprised to learn over the weekend that Google Images has made it easier to search for images with specific copyright licenses. (Thank you Rocking Self Publishing Podcast episode #47)
So I decided to perform a test, but before I do a quick story.
When I grew up we had a beautiful Maple tree in the backyard of our house. That tree not only served as my instructor for tree climbing but also helped to teach me how much fun hard work could be. It did that by dropping it’s leaves each fall. Seriously, what kid doesn’t love jumping into a freshly raked pile of leaves.
I shared that quick story only to explain the rationale for selecting “Maple Tree” as my search term.
To run this search I took the following steps:
1. Go to Google Images
2. Select Search Tools, which brings up a secondary menu
3. Select Usage Rights
In my case, I selected “Labeled for non-commercial reuse” and clicked return.
The beautiful image below is called Cherry Umbrella, and it comes from Chris Ford. (Note - check out his collection of photographs. He’s a talented dude.)
Cherry Umbrella - by Chris Ford
This particular image came up in the second row of choices in Google Image search. When I clicked to visit the page where the image originated, I was surprised to see it had come from Flickr. As a test, I decided to perform the same search on Flickr.
I went to the Flickr Creative Commons page and entered the same search term. There were hundreds of spectacular Maple tree photographs, but I gave up my search for Cherry Umbrella after scrolling for a several minutes.
Flickr is a brilliant source for creative commons images . . . if you have the time to search for exactly what you want.
But, If you’re in a hurry, you might find Google’s filtered image search feature is a faster and more efficient alternative.
