Finding re-usable images for your site

Let’s say you’re a blogger. You’ve just returned from a trip to Chennai City, and you’re writing a post on Chennai landmarks. You want to illustrate your travel guide with an image – as the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. It’s easy to find images of Chennai online. But you want to make sure that you don’t use images without the permission of their owners, and you can’t afford licensing fees for professional photographers.

Today, google launched a feature on Image Search to help you find images that you can use for free, while respecting the wishes of artists and creators. This feature allows you to restrict your Image Search results to images that have been tagged with licenses like Creative Commons, making it easier to discover images from across the web that you can share, use and even modify. Your search will also include works that have been tagged with other licenses, like GNU Free Documentation license, or are in the public domain.

That way , you get great images , no hassles on posting them and the original artists also get the credit that is rightfully theirs. Hence the block that many a blogger , like yours faithfully , face when you want to enhance a post with images and find good ones on the web , but then we shy away from the image as we really do not want the hassle of getting into licenses . Ok , so how do you do this ?Here is what the Google Blog says

To enable this feature, go to our advanced image search page. Under the “Usage rights” section, you can select the type of license you’d like to search for, such as those marked for reuse or even for commercial reuse with modification. Your results will be restricted to images marked with CC or other licenses. Once you confirm the license of the image and make sure that your use will comply with the terms of the license (such as proper attribution to the image’s owner), you can reuse the image. Some of you may already see these options, and we’ll be rolling this feature out to everyone throughout the day.

So all of you who were itching to get images to use , have fun !!

(Source : Official Google Blog)

Technorati : blogging, creative commons, google image search
Del.icio.us : blogging, creative commons, google image search