Bearfruit

Finding awesome images to use for your website can be a challenge. However with this little trick it’s quite easy to find exciting, fresh images that have creative commons licenses allowing you to publish photos on your blog or website (as long as you give attribution to the artist and don’t use them for commercial purposes - see the image’s license for details, but the trick I’m demonstrating here only includes CC licensed images that allow derivative works). Total time to find and add an exciting image to your blog post is 2 - 3 minutes.

“The Scoble Show” by Thomas hawk

Create a bookmark and add the following code as the link for the bookmark:

javascript:void(location.href='http://www.flickr.com/search/?l=deriv&ct=0&mt=photos&q='+encodeURIComponent(prompt("Search%20Term")))

Or drag this link to your bookmark toolbar Flickr CC.

Then when you click the link or bookmark you’ll be prompted to enter a search term. I get the most interesting results when I limit my search to one word.

On the search results page you’ll see a listing of images, click the thumb nail of an image you like. Right above the image you’ll see a link that says “ALL SIZES” which shows you the available image sizes and the license for the image. Confirm the license is OK with you, then grab the largest image size and download it to your PC. The image name by default looks like this:

253375694_718b7fb386_o.jpg

The image name can be used to find the path to the image later on. For the image above just search for “253375694_718b7fb386_o” and it will bring you to the correct place. (The “o” in the image name means “original size.”)

Despite this I still give my images a more meaningful name. Sometimes I use the image name + author’s name + original name, other times I use search term + original name. So for example, “The Scoble Show by Thomas Hawk 253375694_718b7fb386_o.jpg” or “photos 253375694_718b7fb386_o.jpg” (because I searched for the word photos and found this image).

I like to go to the extra step of bringing the image into the Gimp or whatever your graphics editor is and do some interesting cropping on the image. Have fun, I’d love to see what you come up with, share your links. :-)