Tommy Collison

Regular readers of this blog will notice that some of the images that I use on the blog are of much higher quality than anything a year-old iPhone’s able to come out with, and of particular scenes that I probably wouldn’t come across in my daily life.

The images, marked with a “Photo owned by (cc)” come from a wonderful little site called Jazz Biscuit. You enter in a search term and it looks through Flickr images marked with some CC license (Creative Commons is an organization promoting the increase of sharing of images and improving collaboration). Their motto is Share, Remix, Reuse — Legally.

In a nutshell, the people who took these images have released them under a license – more often than not, it means you can use these images so long as you don’t profit from them and you attribute them properly (that’s the “Photo owned by (cc)”).

In my work for Irish Student Blogs (I’ll shut up about it soon, I swear!) I discovered a new website/tool for bloggers who want good, high-quality images to use on their website.

Enter, stage right, SXC. This requires a bit more work, and also requires you to sign up but I believe it worth it. Entering in a search term (my most recent one was ‘studying’) will bring you a huge list of incredibly large. (Some of them are 4000px by 3000px. For non-tech folks, that’s absolutely massive!) You can search without logging in, but to download the high resolution version of the image, you’ll need to be a member. You download the image to your desktop and then upload it through Flickr or WordPress and insert it into your post. It’d be nice to add a small note somewhere, maybe in the description, that you got the image from Jazz Biscuit or SXC. A simple ‘gotten from JB’ will do.

As I’ve been asked so much about where I get the images I insert into my post, I thought I’d answer all your questions about it and write a big long post about it. I’d really recommend the two websites because images are so crucial to blogs.

However, one word of advice, especially for personal bloggers: don’t make every image some stock photo from Jazz Biscuit or SXC.. people read personal blogs because they connect with the author. Adding your own images helps them connect with you :)