Use photos from Flickr to jazz up your blog posts and presentations

Yahoo! photo-sharing site Flickr is a vast collection of imagery captured by talented photographers. And there’s a great way that you can tap into the community’s talent to improve your presentations and blog posts with better imagery. Even better, you won’t be breaking any copyright laws if you follow these steps.

Why do I need Flickr for my blog posts and presentations?

Seth Godin’s Really bad PowerPoint (PDF) makes a great argument that PowerPoint slides should contain imagery that supports the story that you’re telling. Your slides should not contain a sea of bullet points. Read the PDF. It’s only 10 pages, and it’ll change your career for the better.

But the challenge after buying into this method is searching for good images to use. If you start putting images from Google Image Search in your blog posts and presentations, you’ll often end up breaking copyright law.

Steps for using commercially-licensed photos in Flickr

Flickr solves this problem by giving its users the option to use Creative Commons licensing. This allows for users to indicate how others can reuse their work. They have the right to reserve all rights to the photo, allow for modifications to their work, restrict to only non-commercial reuse, allow for commercial use, etc.

Unless you’re making presentations for a hobby presentation or blog, you’ll want to search for photos that are OK for commercial use.

So, without further adieu, here’s how to search Flickr for photos licensed for commercial use:

1. From the Flickr home page, click the Search button. You don’t need to enter your terms yet because we need to do an Advanced Search.
   
2. On the Search screen, click Advanced Search.
   
3. So now this is where you want to enter the terms that you’re looking for. I’m going to enter “monster trucks,” but I’m not going to run the search quite yet.
   
4. Before searching, go to the Creative Commons section at the bottom of the form.
   
   From here, you’ll want to check the boxes next to Only search within Creative Commons-licensed content and Find content to use commercially (unless your presentation or blog isn’t for commercial purposes, of course).
5. Now you can finally click the Search button.

That was pretty easy, eh?

Giving credit where credit is due

Most users on Flickr will indicate on their photos that they at least want credit for their photos. Even if they don’t ask for it, I do so by default. It’s only fair, isn’t it?

So I’ve selected this photo to use in this blog post:

And this is how I would give credit for the photo at the bottom of my blog post:

Photo credit: Flying monster truck by Mafue. Some rights reserved.

As you can see, I’ve done these important things in the attribution:

• Linked the photo title to the photo’s page on Flickr
• Linked the Flickr user’s username to his profile
• Linked to the Creative Commons license attributed to the photo by the Flickr user

Remember, link love is a way of thanking people. :)

You can find the Creative Commons link on the right side of the photo page under Additional Information.

You may want to leave the Flickr user a comment on his or her photo as well. Thank them! I always prefer to let them know that their work is being used so there aren’t any surprises in the future. The trouble up front is well worth it.

Spice up your marketing

If you end up using this tip, be sure to let us know how so in the comments!