Finding images

I’ve enjoyed reading your posts this week!  It’s great to see how Nebraska libraries are using your websites to promote programming, provide reader’s advisory, or just share information with your users.  Incidentally, if you’d like to see what other libraries are doing, it’s easy to do so with this RSS feed (created by Michael Sauers).

castleEven when you’ve written the most amazing post, you sometimes feel that it needs something else.  Pictures can add a lot to your page, but locating images that are freely available can sometimes be tough.  Thankfully, there are a few Internet resources that can assist!

One of my go-to websites is Creative Commons Search.  Just type what you want to find & select a source to search: Google Images and Flickr for pictures, YouTube for video, & more.  You’ll want to open the actual page that hosts your content & check the attribution requirements.  Some creators allow you to use their stuff as long as you give them credit.  Some don’t even require that!

Compfight is a similar site that searches Flickr for available images.  You should be aware that, like a lot of search engines, it puts advertiser content at the top of the page, so look below the line if you’re specifically interested in the free stuff.

 Of course, we can’t forget about Google Images.  A basic search includes both copyrighted and freely-available images, but you can click “Search Tools” and get a new menu that includes “Usage Rights”.  Again, you should definitely check the originating page and verify that the image really is freely available before using it.  Google can make mistakes!

Oh, and please remember not to copy and paste images into your posts.

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