Searching photos online is a big PITA if you care about copyright laws and stuff. A lot of bloggers just use Google image search or Flickr to search for images to use on their blogs without really understanding the terms under which the owner of the photos has released them. Yes, photos have owners (and licenses) too and like all documents they belong to the person who created them. Using a photo or a document belonging to another person without their permission is a violation of copyright laws and can lead to a lot of legal troubles, if you’re not careful.
The way around this is to only use photos which have been marked for reuse by their owners. While there are a number of licenses which are used for this purpose, the most popular one is the Creative Commons, CC for short.
Most image search engines like Google’s image search and the one at Flickr let you restrict your search to CC licensed images but the problem is that the option to enable that is usually hidden away.
In this post, we’ll teach you how you can search for CC licensed images on the internet easily and for free.
The default search setting on flickr searches for all available images. To search only for CC licensed images, click on the advanced search link.
Enter your search term and scroll down to the bottom of the Advanced search page and you’ll see the option to specify searching for only Creative Commons licensed content.
Google Image Search
Google’s Image search is another popular option many bloggers use to search for images online. Google not only lets you search for images by name, it also lets you filter images by colors. The option to filter images by the CC license is also present but like Flickr is hidden away under the Advanced search link.
To search for images that you can use on your blog or in your documents, click on the Advanced search link and select the type of image that you’re looking for, from the drop down titled, “Usage Rights”.
Compfight is another search engine for searching images on flickr. It is also, in my opinion, the simples way to search for CC licensed images on flickr – even simpler than using the Flickr site itself. Compfight makes good use of the flickr API and has a nice and clean interface.
Compfight is definitely my personal favorite because of its neat interface and no-nonsense image search capabilities.
Do you take care to look at the license of an image before using it on your website ? How do you search for commercially useable images online ?
Programmer, blogger and a geek making a living shifting bits around the Internet. Sharninder is the owner of Geeky Ninja
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Hi there! If you want to search for licensed pics then I would recommend Compfight. It’s pretty good if you’re looking for an easy search. Also the interface is nice. Does anyone has some good tipps on searching licensed images? if yes, then please share with us.
I’m using zemanta currently with wordpress, and it does show up license info in the tooltip. otherwise i use creativecommons search from firefox search box but in chrome, zemanta suggestions, along with n inbuilt search box serves fine. In other cases, compfight would be my last resort. :)