Flickr is one of the first places I turn to when searching for a dynamic photo for my blog. The selecion is huge, searching is easy and the quality is top-notch. Every photo on Flickr has a license. There are two major categories: “All Rights Reserved” and a “Creative Commons” license. “All Rights Reserved” means hands off! A “Creative Commons” license means that the photographer has reserved some of their rights but lets people use their photos for free under certain conditions. There are 4 major components. Link here to understand the restrictions. The Attribution component is always part of a Creative commons license, so you will always need to provide credit for the photo with a link to them.

 

Use the Flickr advanced search feature as you can check the box stating that you only want Creative Commons photos to display. Type your keywords and it’ll bring up a page with a huge number of results.

 

Sometimes I use the “most interesting” search filter. Flickr’s concept of interestingness will display unique pictures of high quality. It is just fun to browse through them and lots of ideas for their use will pop in your head!

 

Flickr CC  This is a wonderful tool developed by Peter Shanks.  See the documentation here.

 

Be sure to check out the Flickr Fun page on this wiki for lots of ideas of ways to incorporate Flickr into your teaching day!

 

Here are some other links. I limited my links to sites where images are offered for free. Directions are on each site for their use. Generally you just have to provide a link of credit.

 

AarinFreePhoto.com

 

imagebase

 

PD Photo

 

PIX

 

Wikipedia: Free image resources

 

yotophoto

 

The Realia Project

 

 

Here are some tools that will help with your searches and resizing pictures and other techniques to enhance your images.

 

Creative Commons Search

 

pic resize 2.0

 

PICNIK

 

 

 

 

 

Credits: I have to give credit to Kevin Jarrett of Welcome to NCS-Tech! His site is terrific and he leads us to  countless good sites to use as resources. Many of the above sites came from his blog. Thanks Kevin!

 

Then Andrew Ferguson of Goldengod has a digital photography site that I could spend hours browsing and learning. In particular I borrowed a lot from these two posts:How to Find Great Free Photos for Your Blog How to Use Free Photos to Improve Your Blog I particularly appreciated his explanation of the licenses - clear cut and brief. Plus I like how he gives credit for his Flickr pictures. I'm going to have to switch to that format. Thanks Andrew!