Finding Timely Images for Topical Blog Posts

With the UK having  just hosted the Olympics, I’ve discovered our topical event blog posts have a small problem.

Topical images.

As you all know, you cannot have our hands in the Google Image cookie jar without expecting some kind of retribution from the original owner, and of course some of those images are not licensed beyond the site they are on.

So using Google Images for topical blog posts is pretty much a financial suicide mission.

You also can’t just lift an image from a news site saying “kindly borrowed from xxx” – that’s still image theft and you can still be taken to court, found guilty and punished heavily.

The same goes for newspapers – you can’t borrow an image from them without breaching someone’s copyright, so it’s best to stay away from them too.

Pinterest? Again, if the original source of the image isn’t there you can be heading for trouble, so you have to be really careful with sources of images on Pinterest.

Flickr is always useful, but lately I’ve found too many images need licensing from Getty Images. That can take up to 7 days and a topical post cannot wait that long for image approval.

Also the price for a medium image is prohibitive –  $35. That leaves searching for Creative Commons images and that can be tricky at the best of times.

So where do you get topical images from?

There’s More Than One Pinner in Town

Over at Birds on the Blog, these last few weeks we’ve relied heavily on a site called PhotoPin.com.

PhotoPin.com searches Flickr for images that are Creative Commons licensed, and can be used with attribution.

It’s very simple to use. Go to the home page and enter a search term for your event or topical occurrence:

Then wait a few moments for the images to start loading.

When they are loaded, you will need to sort them to find the most recent:

You can also see if the images are licensed for commercial purposes.

Photo Pin is pretty quick and so far, everything we’ve looked for has had ample images to choose from:

The images can easily be previewed by hovering over them.

The next step is to select an image and download it. Again Photo Pin makes this easy for us presenting us with a selection of different sized images, meaning little or no resizing required. For Birds on the Blog this is terrific as we need an image 900 x 300 to slot nicely into our slider on the front page.

When you have chosen the correct sized image just click download and it will be sent straight to your downloads file.

Then all you have to do is highlight the accreditation html and add it to your post, after you’ve uploaded your image of course

Our topical blog posts now have topical images thanks to Photo Pin – job done!