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Thank you so much to Elle, Donna Hodgson, Miss Linda, Joanne, Vicki, Becky, Lindsay T and Summerset for "talking back" to my "confession" last Friday. I confessed that I sometimes copy images off the internet and include them in my blog posts.
As for the responses that I got, I have some good news and I have some bad news. ;)
First, the good news. You know how I often start these "talk back" posts with some statement like "The responses were spread across the board..." or "People were pretty uniformly divided..." ? Well, not this time. A CLEAR consensus emerged on this topic!
Now for the bad news.
The consensus was, "Don't do it!"
Okay, perhaps there were some qualifiers... For example, if I am basically giving a commercial enterprise free advertising AND if I provide credit via a link back to their web site, then maybe it's okay...
But, in general, it seems that most people are pretty darn careful to not use "personal" pictures that can be found on the internet.
Lindsay did point me in the direction of a service called istockphoto.com. I checked it out and photos cost about $7 each (medium size, medium resolution). They certainly have a wide variety, including "art" (?) images that I personally would classify as soft porn and caught me completely by surprise. (Hint: I searched on "kneeling" in relationship to a future planned confession and I do NOT recommend that particular search term!)
I don't know if I'm going to start buying my pictures or not, but obviously, I'm going to have to be more careful in the future. Thank you again, everyone, for taking the time and effort to comment on my post! You always help me with my sewing - this time, you just may be keeping me out of jail! ;)
ETA: In the first two hours since I put up this post, I have gotten three very helpful comments. Wendy pointed me towards the creative commons licensed photos from Flickr (here) and Miss Linda pointed me towards a site called allposters that actually provides html code to display their photos on your blog for free (here).
Finally, Lindsay mentioned that I had misinterpreted the pricing policy of istockphotos and said that they are actually cheaper than I indicated. Sorry about that...
These look like great resources! Thanks so much! :)
3 comments:
Why don't you use Creative Commons lisenced photos from Flickr?
http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/
As the page says "Many Flickr users have chosen to offer their work under a Creative Commons license, and you can browse or search through content under each type of license."
They're free as long as you give a photo credit (check the right column of that page for specifics)- I like following people's photo credit links, because often they have selected a photo from a fantastic photographer, and then you can discover their whole flickr set of work.
I always shoot my own pictures for my blog because I'm a photo nerd, but if I wasn't I would definitely go with the flickr creative commons works.
Gwen, I often use pictures from AllPosters.com. They permit the use of their images on blogs, and give you the HTML code to do so. Just look at the bottom of the page under 'blog this image' and you will see the HTML code. They have images for all sorts of topics from beautiful landscapes to fine art. Embedded in the HTML code is the link back to their site which saves a step.
iStockphotos aren't actually $7 each. You buy credits and then use them to purchase photos. I bought $13 worth of credits a year ago and still have some credits remaining despite having bought a number of photos. Just thought I'd clear that up.
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