Today’s post isn’t intended to help you with your writing. Today’s focus is helping you with your blogging…or website…or even your social media presence. And it’s target isn’t just our readers. Today’ I’m also talking to the people who write for us here at Today’s Author.
Finding an image to use in your blog posts is always just a little stressful. I’m sure we all make the best effort (*clears throat*) to find images that are licensed as Creative Commons or some other Royalty Free source. But it’s not easy. Even when you make the effort you can run across photos that are not free to us, but were distributed–intentionally or unintentionally–as free to use.
As writers, we should all want to make sure that people are getting credit–and when applicable, payment–for their creative work. But for something as mundane as including a picture in a blog post, being ethical can be quite a bit of work.
Well…it just got easier.
For years Getty Images, the largest photo service in the world, let us use many of their images as long as we were willing to put up with a watermark.
But now, Getty has changed the way they share their images. Now a huge number of pictures can be used free, without a water-mark, using their new auto-embed feature. Which also has the side benefit that it gives credit to the content creator.
Here’s how it works (Note: I did not try this first, so I’m writing these steps as I’m trying it–Let’s see how easy it is.
- Go to the Getty Images website.
- Search for something. I’m testing the claim that many of these pictures are about very current events. So I’m searching for “SXSW”.
- OK. That was easy. Now I’ll find a picture I want. Hover over it and look for the embed button (see the example picture below). OK, not all the pictures have this feature enabled–but it wasn’t hard to find a bunch that did,
- Click the embed button.
- In the pop-up box, copy the embed code.
- Paste that code into your own blog. Here how it looks.
Wow. That was significantly easier than I expected.
Looking at the code, by doing this you might have a little less control over placement of the image than with a traditional photo embed. Though I’ll admit I didn’t try to play around with anything more than the size of the image.
This new tool makes it a lot easier for us bloggers to keep on the right side of copyright law. Giving credit where it’s due, is a ridiculously awesome side-benefit.
Where Is My Spot? 