Its hard to believe, but using other people’s pictures on your blog is actually illegal and makes you liable to be sued. Well, most of us don’t really bothered much because to get sued over a small-ish blog is really not worth the trouble.

But what if you plan to make your blog big. What if you are already beginning to earn money from your blog? You are slowly but surely becoming a juicy target for a good sue.

So what can you do? Use Legal Photos of course! Here are the 3 steps I discovered recently.

Step 1. Bookmark these 2 pages. Flickr Attribution License Search and Flickr Attribution and Share Alike License Search.

Step 2. Search for your photos within those pages and Select the ones you like to be included on your Blog.

Step 3. Attribute the photo to the photo owner. A simple link back to the photo’s page will be sufficient.

Here is an example of how its done.

Photo from http://www.flickr.com/photos/66164549@N00/2452618372/

 

Here are a couple of points you may want to know.

• Attribution License is where you can edit the photo to anything you want (add watermark, crop, overlay) and also able to distribute it by selling it or distribute it freely. You can use it for profit or non-profit purposes.
• Attribution and Share Alike License is where you can edit the photo to anything you want and can only distribute under the same license as you got them (freely). You can use it for profit and non-profit purposes.
• If you have advertisements on your blog and you are paid for it, that means your blog is for profit (commercial) purposes. Can’t talk your way out of this one.
• Use Most Interesting and Thumbnail to search as it is the quickest way to browse through and select the photos that you want

I prefer Flickr because it contains pictures taken by other people with interest in photography and want to show the world how great their photos are. As for Stock Photos (most of them requires fees to use their photos), the photos taken are meant to fill up a quota while on a job. It is not that difficult to decide which one has more down to earth and more realistic photos

Lovely Photo from http://www.flickr.com/photos/annia316/754581568/